Myths of Origin (3 page)

The Hare stretched her long feet as though trying for a marathon. She nibbled at a toe, yawned. Nonplussed, I reached out a hand to scratch her head, and she leaned warmly into my palm.

“Where did you come from?” I touched, gingerly, her face.

“Away! Away and away and away and away! Do you know the Way? I do, I do, I do! I am the flower-eater and the grass-devourer. I am the swift sun-runner and the apple-thief. I know the secret. What are you?”

“I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze. And no Door has ever caught me.” The Hare wriggled her silky muzzle and ground her teeth in derision. A massive foot slapped against the ground as the air filled with rabbit-laughter.

“So certain. So full of titles. So proud. Did the Door and swifter than I. Inevitability is the color of water. Movement is a waste. They will find you. I did.”

“Were you looking for me?” I asked incredulously.

“I looked for breakfast.” A sprig of heather disappeared into her little mouth. “Breakfast beckons the strange and you are strangest of all. Eat. Drink. Why punish the earth with your girlfeet? There is sweetgrass and wild lettuce and savory roses—these are enough. Why can you not let it be enough? They are alkaline, syrup-filled, fine as baker’s sugar, and they will coat our throats like warm toffee, like brandy and olive oil, and make us beautiful. The Way escapes you. It will always escape you.
Downdowndowndowndown.
” She snorted and stroked one long, brown ear. “I am the swift sun-runner. My feet are better than yours. Yet still. Still did the Door and brought me. Now I am here with the roses like buttered artichoke hearts and a girlfooted creature insisting on motion.”

I drew aimlessly in the black soil with a tapered finger. Circles, one after the other, each as starless as the last. Downstrokes like bypass surgeries, heart beating like a bavarian choir. I could stay, I could vomit galaxies into this earth and never burn my throat with light, wearing scalpels like jewelry, wrapping my body in bloody togas, reciting my own eulogy with a mouthful of cat’s eye marbles and agaric mushrooms, arm jutting out awkwardly into the world.

I touched her, her softness and earthlight. She laid her head against me, speaking with a barbed intimacy. “What is the secret you know?” I asked.

“Blue Door it was,” she answered, “covered with stars-nine-pointed. Hiding in the raspberry brambles. It snapped at me, clapped on me just like a farmer’s big hands. It leapt; I was not swift that day. Downdowndown. I don’t run anymore, I am not prey. I wait, and swallow things when they come.” She looked at me with brittle eyes, glittering full of the light of the sun on the violets. She was very big, staring straight at me, our heads level. “Stay with me and eat well. Fall through a hundredhundredhundred Doors with me. There are always roses enough. After awhile, even the falling is gentle.”

By now my fingers were thoroughly tangled in her fur, sepia over onyx, swift over slow. I wanted her warmth within me like the Compass, to devour it and hold it still, to take her peace like a pretty ring. But pretty things are all beyond me.

Disentangling, I gathered up a few fallen petals, and met her limpid eyes through a forest of lashes, gently pulling back, and speaking low.

“I am the Seeker-After, I cannot. I must Go, despite the roses.”

“There is nothing,” the Hare assured me, shrugging her autumn-shaded shoulders. “That is my secret. There is no Way—only the staying still and the quiet. The waiting and the melting of a rose petal on the tongue.”

5

My ankle has swollen apple-huge.

As though I were incubating some warm and throbbing egg between my cuneiform bones, the pinch of white hands gripping me tightly during the anointment of the Styx. Humidity sighs orchids and seasmoke through my hair, the vibration of a string bass on the westerly wind, blowing off the invisible Sea in trailing puffs. The moon like a garlic bulb scenting the sky, throwing out starry pale green shoots, glowing between raindrops.

Here am I laughing like the Hare, my girlfeet pierced with honeyed stigmata. Here am I bright as a dueling pistol in the dawn, hobbled and kept still by strange circles turning beneath the skin of my darkbody. I cover my translucent feet with the hem of my skirt, so as to expose what they contain. that perfect Greek ankle, palpitating for the advent of a Serpent, the auroral revelation of a penetrating arrow. I have swallowed the Road, I have eaten death. Hard, coarse black bread crumbling on the teeth like fallout; warmth like oak-honey clogging the cilia with its liquid sibilance. I am awake, I am asleep, I am a somnambulist who each night presses herself between the Walls, in among tiger-spiders. I eat clay and drink dust beside kings whose names I have forgotten or never knew, because we have both refused the gods and their perfumed eyes. We stare ahead and calculate the burn rates of white dwarf stars to pass the time.

I dwell within this invisible ravage, the scald of temptation. Stay within the white wheat the silver and the star, stay within the Wall and the Garden greaves, folded into a rose like an exhausted bee, gold enfolded in scarlet, and sleep forever with a sugared violet pressed on my tongue like a coin on a corpse’s eye. Oh, but it is beautiful, to sleep and to rest and to walk no more. The radiance of true nothingness set against the glimmer of its threat. It would have been a breath of gold to lie against that great leaf-shaded flank, the prickle of sepia-silken fur under my limbs, those pupilless eyes above me like secret moons for all time in the shade of aster-breathing Doors with their sulfurous hinges and studded with heliotrope. They would rise like suns over our sleeping shapes, bodies curved into symbology, and we would fall a hundred times a hundred until the falling was all that existed, the tumbling of her lucent haunches and my hair trailing like kelp on the Sea.
Downdowndowndowndown.

Wouldn’t it be better than this, the Road cutting vision, the Walls containing shocks of self, bolts of tawny motion? The peace of the fall, the certitude, the gentility of surrender. Long railway of silence into the depths that Doors must conceal. How everything here becomes luminous through the illimitable veils of concealment. Seduction shivers through me, the obscene, serpentine promise of what is not known, navigated, charted. Not split like the trunk of a tree into what I have walked and what I will walk. Not the inarguable vastness of the Labyrinth.

But. I accept. I pull back at the threshold, shunning liminal space for the within-ness of Here. I go up the Staircase, and the world is still pressed like a dragonfly in ice. I never touch Edge or Center, never Entrance nor Exit, but remain somewhere inside, hanging pendulously among the trembling owl-winged scales embracing all those who fall.

It is late, it is early, it is dark, it is light. How I lust for light, all light. Did I once beneath the apple trees stand scrubbed clean and pink by the sun, white flowers trailing my heels, laughter shaking the red fruit from the branch, eyes pools of August skies? Is this the
alwaysnow
, under the yew trees with violet flowers bleeding into my hair, learning desert tongues from the moon and carving whitethorn sculptures of Rabbits and Doors. But the green softness of the wood under my silver knife excites me. There is nothing in my footprints, not even dust, not even the ridges of a usual foot. One feather-fanned mark in the Road drags more than the other, the thorn in my heel pulling back towards the little patch of grass, back towards liquid coffee eyes, back towards those endless roses. The alexandrine tooth of a hare embedded in that hollow where skin is a papery wing over quivering bone, thorn-chaining me into stillness. Checking my movements—black queen to e4.

I enter, near dawn, a twisted tower of ice, of glass. The Labyrinth here has fallen into freeze, the Road disappeared beneath cream-cobalt crystal, reflecting, refracting, eating the color of sky like winter soup. It reflects the small, silent colors of sunrise onto my deepened skin, blue over black, rippling, sighing. Fountains still in stop-motion, cresting wave of water arching through the sky, a cascade of diamonds. All the earth has become a diamond, a faceted jewel pulsing like a heart. Whiteness devours. I am caught in this freeze-frame, the same few seconds of film over and over, the same cold moonlight, the same tinkling piano, the same villain in the shadows, the same ingenue. At least it is white, under the veil of silver and blown glass that admits no imperfection. That banishes original sin. In this world, my lips are perfect, my skin snowy.

The beautiful darkbody flees in the face of all this hoary paleness—the Labyrinth has stolen it. I am bloodless—snow hair falls to my waist, pupilirisall vanishes into classical eyes of milky stillness, though my sight remains. The jet of my tongue shrieks into the air, a mouth of chalk remains. I am a long scroll of blank paper, all color ripped from me like a gown. I stagger with the violence of tearing. The flowers are a graceful gasp under the silver Sea. The elegant bannisters of staircases, gone to blown glass and aquamarine. Shall I go up? Shall I go down?

6

Hic monstra delitescunt . . . 

I could not say, I could not say. Whether there are monsters hereabout. I have said that I am not exactly alone, but then, I am not exactly
togetherwith
, either. I have seen things, in the shadows, but who is to say? I dance on the leeward side of the mandrake Wall and a quarter of my iris rebels into violet, the Walls march in a phalanx and my body becomes quicksilver, shining as a trout in the river, illuminating the spear-leaves and wizard-staff stems, reflecting on my rippling skin the wormwood and the moonseed, the orris root and the milkweed. Who can ever know what I have seen there revealed? The shadows know, in their depths and scrying sleek. Whether when I in a fever cross a drawbridge made for children with smaller feet than I, a troll with ambergris eyes lurks delicately beneath the creaking wood. Whether at the Center-which-is-not of all of this rests a quiescent Minotaur, his horns resplendent with blood and ash, death in an amulet around his neck, eyes like shuriken, a great brass ring in his poisonvelvet nose. Whether his volcanic heart thumps in time to mine, whether he waits for me in the geometric darkness, to wed himself to the Labyrinth forever in the sacred ritual of my dismemberment.

Will I serve as a corridor between them? I fear a Minotaur. I fear hooves tramping in showers of the white blood of lotuses, crushing Franciscan bones under him. Hooves separating brow from skull, viscera of the “I” that is me digested through a Maze of four stomachs (for do not all we Labyrinth creatures carry the turning Path inside us. We carry so much, all of us pregnant with incident.) I fear a Lair of rattling sternums and tibia, prayer ropes and iron ore. But there is no Center to house a Lair to hold a Beast, so if one echoes in this place, he must roar his acidic throat to razors among the halls of where-I-have-not-walked, and stalks, a hunter like the rest. Some ways back I saw a pile of Doors splintered and broken like moldered corpses. They had a smell of rotted almonds and shoe leather. Am I to be as they are, cracked and bleeding in the jeweled hinges of a vengeful Gate?

“
Hic monstra delitescunt. Sed puella, puella, ubi abscondes
?”

Voice like a rustling of linden leaves, like sand becoming a pearl. My hand fluttered to my mouth in terror, hiding the shameful whiteness of my lips. She sat on a Wall of salmon scales, which clinked and jingled as she turned her perfect face towards me, eyes full of hawk’s claws. Her wings reached back over the crest of the Wall and nearly brushed the ground, arched and pointed, of feathered ice and lapis lazuli. Her body covered in a skin of milky opals, clinging to her breasts and belly, her long arms and her bare feet. I could not speak. My blank statue-eyes were helpless, could offer nothing to her beauty. In her hands a slim rod of ash and spider-thread, she was fishing in the Road, a hole cut in the ice of a left-hand turn. An Angel of Ice-Fishing. She was smoking a long reed pipe, tobacco that smelt of cranberries and elephant-skin. And hauling trout from the Road in great silver heaps, flopping beside her on the Wall. Some leapt ecstatically towards her, not waiting for the line and bait.

I climbed up, clumsy and strange in my lightbody, full of cold and slowness. In the mountains of fish I found a resting place, leaning against the marine brickwork. Amid a corona of smoke she pressed the rod-end into a crack in the Wall. The fish still threw themselves at her opaline body, eyes full of her form. She curled her lips into

“
Hic monstra delitescunt, cara
.”

I looked up into her and choked, “You speak the language of the Doors!”

She breathed her jungle tobacco into my pale mouth. “Yes,” she hissed, “Do you think perhaps I am a Door?”

I could not answer, tongue thick in my bloodless mouth. The Angel leaned into me, cold radiating from her owl-skin. She began to draw on my papery flesh in stark black chalk on my belly and lunar, heavy breasts. Her finger was cold.

“The key to catching trout is the lure,” she intoned throatily, tracing a horse-shape on my thigh. “Today they are biting on dragonflies smeared in my blood.” She exhales, long and critically, editorializing her drawing with smoke-rings. She began on a spiraling snake, just below my left shoulder. “Tomorrow it will be roasted cicadas. They are fickle.”

“Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.” She listened intently to me, as if diagnosing a tumor hiding in my voice.

Slowly she took possession of me through the figures; antelope grazing across my shoulder blades, leaping salmon on the soles of my tattered feet, dragonfly-knees, flames searing up my arms, river-belly, storm-brow, tree-spine. A fleur-de-lis branded onto the nape of my neck. And a great snail shell winding around itself, blazing on the small of my back. My lips she paints with the blood of enthralled trout, but my eyes, still yet uniform perfect white. And I lie against the silver bodies, empty within my mosaics of wounded buffalo and women carrying water, all rock and dripping water, all darkness and sleeping bears. Claws clack on my stones.