Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (32 page)

Do you think that was such a good idea?

It’s a message in a bottle. Messages like that, no one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off anyway.

And Edith removes the stone from the slit in the sand, which then immediately closes, leaving behind no trace that it was ever actually there. She stares at the spot for a moment, comprehending, and then she flings the stone into the sea. There’s no splash; the waves take it back without any sound and without so much as a ripple.

The circuit has been closed
, she thinks, though the metaphor strikes her as not entirely appropriate.

She looks to the sky, and sees birds wheeling against the curdled clouds. The dream pushes her back into wakefulness, then, and, for a while, Edith lies still, squinting at the half-light of dawn and listening to a woman sobbing softly somewhere in the room.

5.

When Edith was seven years old, she saw a mermaid. One summer’s day, she’d gone on a picnic with the aunt and uncle who raised her (after the death of her parents), to the rocky shore below Beavertail Lighthouse on Conanicut Island. There are tidal pools there, deep and gaping clefts opened between tilted beds of slate and phyllite, and in one of them she saw the mermaid. It rose, suddenly, towards the surface, as if lunging towards her. What most surprised her child’s mind was how little it resembled any of the mermaids she’d seen in movies and storybooks, in that it was not a pretty girl with the tail of a fish. Still, she recognized it at once for what it was, if only because there was nothing else it could have been. Also, she was surprised that it seemed so hungry. The mermaid never broke the surface of the pool, but floated just beneath that turbulent, glistening membrane dividing one world from the other.

I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent even day of her life on dry land.

The mermaid watched her fora while, and Edith watched the mermaid. It had black eyes, eyes like holes poked into the night sky, and did not seem to have eyelids of any sort. At least, Edith never saw it blink. And then, as abruptly as it had risen, the mermaid sank back into the deep cleft in the rock, leaving behind nothing for a seven-year-old girl to stare at but the sloshing surface of the pool. Later, she told her aunt and uncle what she’d seen, and they both smiled and laughed (though not unkindly) and explained that it had only been a harbor seal,
not
a mermaid.

When they got back home that evening, her uncle even showed her a color picture of a harbor seal in one of his encyclopedias. It made Edith think of a fat dog that had learned to live in the ocean, and looked nothing whatsoever like the mermaid that had watched her. But she didn’t say this to her uncle, because she’d begun to suspect that it was somehow
wrong
to see mermaids, and that any time you saw one, you were expected to agree that what you’d really seen was a harbor seal, instead. Which is what she did. Her aunt and uncle surely had enough trouble without her seeing mermaids that she shouldn’t see.

A week later, they had her baptized again.

Her uncle nailed her bedroom window shut.

Her aunt made her say the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, and also sewed sprigs of dried wormwood into her clothes.

And they never went back down to the rocky place below the lighthouse at Beavertail, and always thereafter had their picnics far from the sea.

6.

Edith does not doubt that she’s now awake, any more than, a moment before she opened her eyes, she doubted that she was still dreaming. This is not the next tier, nor merely the next painted wooden doll in the matryoshka’s stack. This is the world of her waking, conscious mind, and this time she will not deny that for the sake of sanity or convenience. There has always been too much of lies about her, too much pretend. When her eyes have grown accustomed to the early morning light, she sits up in bed. Sammie is still crying, somewhere in the room, somewhere very close by, and as soon as Edith sits up, she sees her crouching naked on the hardwood floor near the foot of the bed. All around her, the floor is wet. She has her back turned to Edith, and her head is bowed so that her black hair hangs down to the pine floorboards. Edith glances immediately to the little table beside the bed, but the peculiar tear-shaped pebble from Moonstone Beach is gone. She knew that it would be, but she looked anyway. The air in the room smells like a fish market.

Sammie, or the thing that now occupies the place in this universe where Sammie used to be, has stopped sobbing and has begun a ragged sort of trilling chant in no language that Edith knows or thinks she’s ever heard. It sounds much more like the winter wind, and like waves rolling against sand, and the screech of herring gulls, than it sounds like human speech. Edith opens her mouth and almost calls out to Sammie, but then she stops herself. The thing on the floor probably wouldn’t answer to that name, anyway. And she’d rather not use any of the names to which it might respond.

Its skin is the same murky pea green as the vanished stone, and bears all the same marks that were carved into the stone. All the same wounds, each pregnant with significance and connotations that Edith has only just begun to grasp. There is a pentacle—or something almost like a pentacle—cut deeply into each of Sammie’s shoulders, and a vertical line of left-facing swastikas decorates the length of her spine. Wherever this new flesh has been sliced open, it leaks a greasy black substance that must be blood. Below the swastikas, there is the symbol that reminded them both of a Greek
ichthus
, centered just above Sammie’s ass. Edith cannot help but wonder if Sammie was reborn with these wounds already in place, like birthmarks, or if they came later, not so differently than the stigmata of Catholic saints. Or if maybe they’re self inflicted, and Edith remembers her own hands in the dream, the sharp claw’s where her nails had been. In the end, it hardly matters how the marks came to be; the meaning is the same, either way.

Do you think that was such a good idea
?

It’s a message in a bottle. No one ever expects to get an answer, hut we keep sending them off...

“When you’re ready,” Edith says, almost whispering, “I’ll be right here. There’s no hurry. I know how long you’ve been waiting.” Then she lies back down, and turns to face the wall.

No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Terry Pratchett

The game is ours, or so we like to imagine. We cannot, of course, ever know for certain that the game is our own invention. Indeed, whenever either of us pauses to consider the matter, we both must readily admit how exceedingly unlikely it is that we are the first to have conceived so simple and obvious a diversion.

I would say
simple
and
obvious
; you would say
inherently elegant.
You would say the genius of the game
resides
in its elegance. I wouldn’t disagree, but I have never had your way with words. For that matter, I have never had your way with darkness. I understand, full well, that I’m the student, struggling to keep pace. I also understand this amuses you, that you always have the edge, that the advantage is always yours.

And, so, in this space we have set aside for the game, I’m the one who finds herself cuffed to the stainless-steel ring bolt set deep into the old masonry. There is a length of chain connecting the steel bolt to a D-ring, fastened securely to the padded leather wrist restraints I wear. It’s not uncomfortable, and the chain is long enough that I can stand, and even move as far as the center of the room. There’s nothing in the room, except the ring bolt and the chain and the cuffs that hold me. And you, of course. The walls and ceiling and even the floor have all been painted the same matte black, four heavy coats on every surface. The one window has been boarded over, and we have seen to it that no light can leak in around the door. We are thorough, and have insured that, once a new round of the game begins, no illumination enters the room from any source whatsoever.

There
is
a single, naked 60-watt bulb screwed into a socket mounted on the high ceiling, but it can only be switched on from the hallway outside the black room. Once, on a whim, you left me alone in the room for three hours with that bulb burning starkly overhead. On several occasions,you’ve left me alone in the room, and for extended periods of time, but only that
once
with the light shining. Somehow, the light made being alone in there much worse. Held at bay, the darkness pregnant in every plane and angle of that space seemed far more threatful. Perhaps, I imagined it was conscious and resented the light holding it back, much the same way a hungry lion or jaguar might resent a roaring fire. And, as you have repeatedly reminded me, imagination is the necessary catalyst or reagent, if the room is to become anything
more
than merely an empty room painted black.

You are fond of a line from
Hamlet
, and how it applies to our game and to our black arena or theatre.

... there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

And
this
night might well be any other night when we’ve chosen to play, which is not to say that our game has become repetitious or monotonous. Accepting the inviolable blackness as a given, as square one, there is an almost infinite number of permutations that might follow. I am alone in the room, cuffed to the chain fastened to the ring bolt driven into bricks and mortar, and I have absolutely no way of knowing what will happen next. Usually (but not always), you leave me for a time with only the dark for company. It might be five minutes, or thirty, or an hour. I have no way of knowing. You’ve referred to this as the prelude, and the overture, and also described it as “a palate cleanser.” Oh, and there’s another line of verse you’re fond of quoting, this one from Milton, and I find it applicable to the customary waiting period that comes before the game begins in earnest.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

I lie naked on the hard floor, and when you’re ready, you’ll open the door and slip inside. And, usually, that’s the last I’ll get of light until the game is done, the muted rectangle from the doorway, creating and framing your silhouette. And even this is not a constant, as you have devised many clever techniques of altering the shade and the quality of light from the hall beyond the room, and also of altering what I might see of your profile. Once in a while, I’ll miss your entrance altogether. My face will be turned away from the door, my eyes will be shut, or my light-starved optic nerves will have become preoccupied with nonexistent patterns that appear to dart and swoop about me. You are especially pleased whenever this happens, when my usual disadvantage is increased by an extra element of surprise.

But, to my credit, I have never yet screamed. You’ve told me that
if I
ever scream, we might stop playing the game.

“What would even be the point in continuing after that,” you’ve said. “Once I’ve heard you scream, I mean. It’s a sort of threshold, and once it’s been crossed, I don’t really see much to be gained by crossing it again.”

I took these words to heart, and, so far, they have been sufficient to stop me from screaming or crying out in any other way, regardless what might happen in the black room. I cannot bear the thought of our game coming to an end. And I don’t need to be warned twice.

I lie here on the floor, and the door opens, and then the door closes again. This is one of the times when I happen to be turned towards it, and so I catch the light from the hallway, which has a reddish hue tonight. It’s dim, but still bright enough that my pupils ache after all that dark. I squint into the murky red light and see your silhouette, though something about the proportion of your head to your shoulders is wrong. Before I have a chance to figure it out, how exactly you’ve managed to change your appearance, the door closes again, and the lock clicks loudly as the deadbolt slides into place, and the greater darkness returns.

Long minutes pass, and you haven’t said a word. Upon entering, your footsteps were almost impossible to detect. This is another part of the game that varies wildly. Sometimes, your feet are loud against the floor, and sometimes they’re muffled and virtually inaudible. Sometimes, you tiptoe with bare feet, and sometimes you brazenly stomp about in hard-soled shoes with sharp stiletto heels. Tonight, you are at your most noiseless, silent as the most accomplished sneak thief, and I don’t even bother hazarding a guess as to where you’re sitting or standing, kneeling or crouching, at how near or far from me you might be.

I lie very still, and I wait. Time passes, though I have no way of reckoning how much or how little of it comes and goes. I think perhaps I can hear you breathing, somewhere in front of me, but I can’t be sure. I close my eyes when motes of nonexistent light begin to dance before them, though that doesn’t really help very much.

I close my eyes, and I wait.

And, finally, I begin to wonder if maybe you’ve mastered some new bit of legerdemain, and have slipped out without my having seen or heard you go. It may be, I think, that I am alone in the black room, and the thought brings a sudden and inexplicable wave of panic. You would surely deem that an
elegant
new strategy, and give yourself a gold star for being so clever. I open my eyes again, thinking perhaps I might have dozed off, that I may have lain here asleep, surrounded by nothing at all but the smothering, absolute darkness. That’s happened before. And then, as if you can now count telepathy among your arts, you whisper my name. You only whisper, but in this silent black room that we have fashioned, a whisper can be a thunderclap, and it startles me so badly there’s a rush of adrenaline that leaves my heart pounding, and I feel sick and even more disoriented.

“Not getting bored, I hope,” you say, still whispering. You’re in fine form tonight, and your voice betrays not even the slightest hint of your gender or age, and no trace of emotion, either. It could be anyone’s voice, or the voice of no one, at all. And you’ve long since learned to pitch it in such a way that I’m incapable of knowing from which direction it’s coming, so those five words, those six stingy syllables, are no help whatsoever in revealing where you are.