Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (8 page)

“You really should be more careful what you offer,” she tells him, but he’s drunk enough now that her words fail to register as either a joke or a warning. And then the collector of bones takes the boy by the hand and leads him past a rough ziggurat fashioned from human skulls and the skulls of horses and cows and goats. Just beyond the ziggurat, where she’s hidden a window underneath plywood and more gypsum plaster and yet another sunburst (this one built primarily from the remains of coyotes), there is a low dais supporting a chair built almost entirely from the thigh bones and ribs of dead men and women, its seat and back upholstered with cerise velvet. She asks him to sit, and he does so with only a moment’s hesitation. She steps back and stares at the boy fora minute or two, then turns to a pair of elk antlers nailed to the wall and removes one of the necklaces of python and anaconda and rattlesnake vertebrae hanging there. She drapes it about his neck and takes the now empty brandy bottle with its tattered label from his hands. He doesn’t protest on either account, but only glances down at the necklace resting against his bare and hairless chest, and then back up at her.

“Can I touch them?” he asks, and she tells him yes, that he can. The way the boy delicately fingers the snake vertebrae, one at a time, exploring all the sharp angles and the flat, smooth surfaces, reminds her of someone praying the rosary. She’s about to turn away again, to retrieve her camera bag and tripod from their hiding place within a hollow mound of pig bones, when the boy says, “There’s something I remember from high school, just some poetry. But I’ll recite it for you, if you want to hear it. No extra charge.”

“Poetry?” she asks, realizing just how drunk he is, all the liquor on top of whatever else he might have taken before she found him. “What sort of poetry?”

“William Shakespeare,” he replies. “I think I remember it all, if you want to listen. But if you don’t, that’s okay, too.”

“Of course,” she says, curious now and amused at her own lack of impatience. “I would love to hear you recite Shakespeare for me. At no extra charge.”

And
at that, the boy sits up a little straighter and stops fidgeting with the necklace. He squints and blinks a few times, then makes a show of clearing his throat, and the collector of bones realizes that he has an erection.

“I can’t remember which play it’s from,” he says. “Just something I liked enough to memorize,” and she tells him that it doesn’t really matter. The boy laughs very softly to himself, and when he speaks, his voice seems clearer and more confident than it has been all night.

...
and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

And then he laughs again, and she claps, and she tells him that the lines come from
Romeo and Juliet
, Act V, Scene II, Juliet with her nurse in the Capulet’s orchard.

“Well, fuck, there you go. I always was a bit of a fag,” he says, and she tells him how much she has always loved that particular passage, which is true.

“Yeah, like I said before, my grandmother used to say I was sort of psychic, so I guess I must have known that, right?”

“Yes. I suppose so,” the collector of bones replies, and then she stoops to retrieve her camera bag while the whore halfheartedly begins to fondle himself.

She lies naked on the long, low table carved from slate half a hundred years ago. And around and above her, the smoky, fragrant air has filled almost to bursting with the muttering, intoxicated clamor of all those who have come this night to worship her, all those whom she soon will serve. They are naked, too, every one of them, these ecstatic men and women, and their bodies sway to drumbeats and the trill of ivory flutes and to other still stranger music that can only be heard
inside
their heads. Their feet pound the dusty wooden floor of the attic, and she listens, trying to catch the rhythm of the dance, if there is a rhythm to be discerned, and the pretty eunuch kneeling beside her on the table smiles and kisses her again. The wills of the high old house at the edge of the sea are washed by alternating tides of firelight and shadow, a wild and restless chiaroscuro that might just as easily pass for shades of Hell or Heaven.

“You’re not afraid?” the eunuch asks her, and she shakes her head very, very slowly.

“I am not afraid,” she whispers.

“No pain,” he sighs, and the woman lying on the slate table stops watching the walls, then, and lets her eyes wander back to his.

“No pain,” she smiles, though it is only the slightest possible of smiles, and someone who has not spent weeks learning her subtlest mannerisms might have missed it or mistaken it for another expression entirely. But the eunuch has spent all those days and nights studying her and tending to her needs, and it doesn’t escape his notice.

“No pain,” he says again, “but there is great pleasure, yes?” And now she nods and grins so that anyone would know her smile for a smile.

The table is cluttered with an array bowls and bottles and jars, a granite mortar and pestle, whisks and basting brushes, colanders, measuring cups and spoons—ceramic and glass and stainless steel to contain everything that is required. There are generous bouquets of herbs, both dried and fresh—basil, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace, bay, cumin, coriander, licorice and anise, tarragon and wild thyme and sage. There are onions and leeks and fat bulbs of garlic, lemons and key limes, the speckled eggs of quails, pomegranates grown in faraway Azerbaijan and rose hips picked that same morning from the dunes near the house. There is extra-virgin, cold-pressed olive oil, vinegars fermented from apples, dates, raisins, and malt, and there is an assortment of wines and liquors. There are neat mounds of salt from Bolivia and Senegal and Spain. No expense has been spared, no detail overlooked , and it is unlikely that any banquet has ever been assembled with more deliberation and exacting care.

“They have all come to see
you
, my dear,” the eunuch says, and then he goes back to massaging her bare belly and breasts with the pungent mixture of oil and spice that he has prepared while the others drank and danced, fucked and howled their wordless bacchanal to the New England skies and whatever dark, half-forgotten gods might or might not be listening.

“To
see
me,” she whispers, still smiling,and her eyes drift back to the frenzied interplay of light and shadow swarming across the attic’s walls and ceiling rafters.

“You are such a
wondrous
sight,” the eunuch says. “A very special thing to behold, and none of us are ungrateful for so precious an opportunity.”

The pale woman lying naked on the table has violet eves, and her long hair is almost as colorless and fine as corn silk. There is a small scar on her chin, from when she was seven and took a tumble on her bicycle. There is a faint scatter of freckles across both shoulders, but not a single one to be found anywhere else on her body.

“You are almost,
almost
perfect,” the eunuch says, rubbing a bit of oil deeper into her left nipple. “You are
special
, and we might well wait a thousand years before another such as you comes along.” Then he sits back on his heels, wiping his hands clean on a towel, and he admires her glistening, milk-white skin and those eyes like nuggets of hard Christmas candy. “You must not for a moment think us ungrateful, or believe that we are taking your gifts for granted.”

She nods, but her gaze remains fixed on the ceiling and walls. “I am also grateful,” she replies, and he Listens, expecting something more, desiring something more, revelation or confession. But there are only those six syllables, and then she blinks once, and smiles for him again.

At sunset, before she was taken from her cell in the basement of the old house, the woman was shaved with a pearl-handled straight razor, and the mound of her sex, the gentle rise of the
mons Veneris
, is nearly smooth as the day she was born. She has been fully dilated, and her vagina is held open by the metal jaws of an antique speculum of the type first constructed by the French physician Philippe Ricord in 1834. The eunuch glances at her face, relieved to see such complete peace there, certain now that the cocktail of iv-drip opiates and hypnotism has done its job, and whatever the violet-eyed woman feels—whatever caress or wound or violation—can only be interpreted by her brain as pleasurable sensations.

“We will not live long enough to ever again see anything even
half
so beautiful as you,” he says, reaching into a large wooden bowl heaped with peeled garlic cloves and whole yellow chanterelles, diced shiitakes, peppercorns, and ripe cranberries. He takes a single handful, and while she watches the shadowplay thrown across rotting boards and peeling wallpaper strips, he begins to stuff her with the ingredients from the wooden bowl. She moans a welcoming sort of moan at his familiar touch, and so he reaches for a second handful, and then a third, packing in as much as she can contain. Soon, her moans and gentle gasps are not a response to the eunuch’s hands on and inside her, but to the growing sense of
fullness
between her legs.

“I can hear the sea,” she tells the eunuch, realizing that the dancers aren’t moving to a rhythm dictated by the drummers or the flutes, but to the crash of waves slamming themselves against the rocky shore. The woman lying on the table laughs, feeling foolish that she did not recognize the source of that cadence from the very beginning—each icy line of breakers shattered in foam and spray, energy and momentum that has traveled halfway across the Atlantic, perhaps, finally spent and dissipated before the sea rushes back upon itself, marshalling an inexhaustible strength for another assault upon the exposed and weathered bones of the continent. And then she whispers, dredging a bit of poetry from her drowsy, meandering thoughts, “It’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind...”

The eunuch pluses to wipe his hands again, after removing the speculum and setting it aside. He asks her, “It isn’t really so melancholy, is it? Not when you start to comprehend what it is she’s saying to us, the sea, what she has
always
been saying since we were only single-celled things, twitching in her Proterozoic womb?”

“No,” the woman replies. “You’re right. It isn’t melancholy. I was just remembering, that’s all. The words just came to me.”

“Words will do that, unless you’re very mindful,” the eunuch says, and then he has to hunt about a moment before locating the surgical needle, partly hidden beneath half a green bell pepper. The needle is already threaded, and, for the third time, he says, “No pain.”

“No pain,” she assures him. “I have gone where it can’t find me, not ever again.”

“Yes,” he tells her. “Yes, you have. And any one of us would give everything this night to take your place, if it were only our place to take. You ire blessed, and soon you will fill us with all the blessings of Mother Hydra.”

“Soon,” she says, and then he leans over her and pierces her right labium majorum with the tip of the needle, pushing the steel easily into and through the soft fold of flesh, then drawing the length of catgut after it. Her blood paints the straw-colored thread a wet shade of crimson that is almost black, but the woman doesn’t cry out or flinch. A moment later, the needle cleanly punctures the left labium, and the eunuch snips the thread and ties the suture off tightly with a triple throw knot. It’s a procedure he has performed more often than he can now recall—several times each year, and some years more than others—and his hands move quickly, without hesitation, certain in their work.

“Closing the door,” she murmurs.

“Yes,” he says, “Just as I explained, closing the door and locking it behind me, that nothing will be lost.”

“Even as our Mother slammed closed the doors of the ocean,” she sighs, repeating one of the eunuch’s litanies. She memorized most of them, waiting in her basement cell below the high old house, not because he expected her to, but because it helped the time go faster “Closed and sealed,” she continues, “against all incursions, and against any who would defile the absolute night of the Abyss, against man and demons, against time and the storms that lash at the heart of the world.”

As the eunuch stitches her shut, some of the women and men have stopped their dancing and come to stand at the edge of the cluttered slate table. The smell of her blood has commingled with the animal stinks of sweat and sex and with the aromatic smoke rising in grey gouts from smoldering brass censers strung up overhead—frankincense and myrrh, blood and perspiration, copal and juniper, spilled semen and leaking vaginal secretions. When some among the dancers press their Angers gently against the bleeding, sutured flesh, the eunuch does not try to stop them. Nothing should be wasted, and he works around their eager, groping fingers, pausing now and then to watch as they lick precious drops of the violet-eyed woman from their fingertips.

“Only a taste,” he cautions, then ties off the twenty-seventh stitch. “Only an intimation of what is to come.”

“Yes. Only a
taste
,” she whispers and laughs again, struggling to remember the rest of the litany, trying to think through the delicious throb and ache spreading out from her crotch. The eunuch has taken care to leave the head of her clitoris exposed, and she lets her left hand wander down to it. It is slick with oil and blood, with her own juices and those from the mixture stuffed into her distended vagina and cervix; delicately, she pinches the erect glans between thumb and index finger. She shuts her eyes, wanting to hear nothing now but the surf against the granite headlands. The voice of the goddess speaking across aeons, in this moment calling out to her and no one else.

“Below the thunders of the upper deep,” she says, slowly stroking her clit as she recites the lines. “Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea, her ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep... faintest sunlights flee about her shadowy sides; above her swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height. And far away into the sickly light... and far away...” But she trails off, quite sure that she’s gotten it wrong, completely wrong, and this is some other prayer or poem or incantation, and one that she is not even remembering the right way round.