Myths of Origin (7 page)

Exasperated, I spit words like poison darts. “I do not need you.”

This was predictably ignored. “You must give me the Stone.”

“Why?”

“To demonstrate a Thing. You do not want it anyway, you ran from the Angel like a river from the mountain.”

How weary can I become before I vanish? I handed over the Stone, because it is what I am supposed to accomplish, what has been written for me to do, what is required to silence him, to further the Road another inch, another mile, another winter clutch of nights like a basket of hissing eggs. Someone asks me a thing and I do it. I am only the object.

And into his little gold mouth it goes, sparking briefly with light glinting off his unsettling teeth. He smiled at me, a smile of perfect satisfaction.

“See? Nothing changes. I am not consumed with the finding of the Source, the End, the Monster. It was afraid. Now I Have it and it will ferment. It will drive you mad; already you are a little
loooony
. But without the blessings of madness you will not survive. Hoo. Only the mad can find anything under the sun. Now it has all begun properly, and you cannot escape it.” He rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue like a party favor.

“Why would you do this to me? I have never hurt you!” I heard my voice as from a distance, wondering tremulously at his green-flecked eyes.

“Another time, Darlingblue. Explanations are a waste compared with the metamorphoses we will find under a thousand spotted leaves. Come, come, come.” His
hoo
was soft and warm while he took my hand blue as a Map in his leathery paw and half-sings:

“Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is laid out against the sky . . . ”

14

And now we are two.

The Walls wind thickly in long, womanly curves now, covered with a fine thin bead of playing cards and syringes, sweated movement of clubs and hearts, binary black and red, down to the invisible sea. Step for step I am matched by golden feet, slide-swish down the Road at twilight, into the night, into the stars and the black canvases, into the pendulums swinging from a nervous sky, earlobes of clouds belly-heavy with listening. It is not unpleasant, to have company. He does not speak because I have not. Lunacy, if I have opened my veins to its beastlight, surrounds like a nimbus. I can eat the Center, and be whole. It is possible. Temptation has fled in her red shoes and gargoyle petticoats, ravening through a forest primeval, drowned in a sleeping river with the Stone around her neck, to weight her to the sandy bottom. No more the grotesque desire, the terrible Lie of Purpose, the seduction of Meaning. I have wrestled with the Angel and pinned her opaline shoulders to the red, red rock. He took it from me like a tumor and perhaps there is now some hope.

But they are all Lies, even Temptation. They whisper of Reasons, of coming and going, of Time, and of the possibility of a thing that came before. Dread dark bullroaring fear of a
beforethis
, frog-sounds in the marsh of midnight, dreaming of who I might have been before I Walked. It does not exist within me, my interior is the Mazescape of the Labyrinth, vein to vesicle to womb floating like a rough hewn-raft. I cannot locate it among the branching capillaries and smoky pneuma, I do not believe it is there. But I could not say. I cannot say anything anymore. Once there was no new thing in the Labyrinth, and I thought I understood. I survived. I cannot say anything anymore. I am not quite myself, not quite another. I draw the stars down upon my head with a sickle blade. I think he is right, that I am going mad. I do not fear it (
hoo
) but I think it is just behind me, on fox paws, printing patterns of circlescirclescircles on the dust of the Road.

What do you see?

Oh, what do you see but the salamander’s back splayed out against the sky, the fire-lizard caught in a frieze of Death, the silhouette of scorpion and desert? I see nothing, it is all black, no turns, no hiding places, no Doors with handles of gold. No cloudwalls drifting across the hooded moon, her mask of wax and spittle of cicadas, her ululations, her hair of whistling bats. Wholeness, unbroken, clay pot filled with jasmine tea, warbling in its earthen goblet, satori-sky of blossom and grass harp. When I was in my darkbody how beautiful I was, how singular, how like this perfect expanse of charcoal smeared across half of all, how hidden and cohesive was I in my sweet-smelling nightskin.

We walk and walk and walk and there is no end. He chatters on, and I cease to hear, the voices within bubbling in my kettle-body. Cycling stains, marks of wood-stamps on my skin forced to open and receive, wedged open with an ash spear, my entire form slashed and drinking. And yet—

What do you see?

Wisps of logic, penetrating like armies with furred hats and shaggy horses when the world had ordered itself without. We build our Walls high as—

(—the topless towers of Ilium)

We push our shield-line against theirs—bronze on bronze,

(—And will I combat)

Gates bruising the clouds—

(—come, give me my soul again, here I will dwell)

Our arrows pierce horse-hide and fire-mail—

(—yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel)

Our horses gnash with teeth like tearing steel—we do not want it here—

(—I will be Paris, for love of thee)

And the fire, how high the fire on the turrets, devouring—

(—Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter)

The dissonance, the half-knowns, I cannot, I cannot. I hold my head as though a Monster (the minotaur tossing his horns at my skull) were going to burst from my hairline.

Oh, for the blackness, the smooth and cool hand of that dark heaven on my face, I cannot disembodied drift deadwood between knowing and unknowing, I am being torn by hooks—in the gills of my seabody, the salmon silver gills breathing an air-that-is-not, slits in my flesh like gulping vaginas,
vagina dentata
and the masked knife, rifts and breaches, continental drift splitting my tectonic bones, pullingpulling apart, whispering intimations the voice within, hinting and grasping. Intimate, grave, the song, a frazzled beard brushing my cheek, and down I go into this pool of sick, this avenue of buoyant retch, heaving waves of bottlenecks and Chinese dinners, aluminum siding and bile-soured wine, bread crusts and fish tails and fulminating bananas, ox hearts and newspaper hats and diner menus, sheet music, guitar strings strangling plucked chickens, watery blood and pulp of novellas, hat-rims and shattered upholstery, shoe-heels and shoehorns and turkey livers, tomcats with semen-sticky red fur nosing in this vile flood of me through the Center of the Road, column of vomit floe of madness and dis-ease down those smug cobblestones.

The Monkey, oh, he looks at me with pity crinkling those black flickering green eyes.

(—And none but thou shalt be my paramour)

The sounds of that sibilant pentameter, those lisping lips worming over my throat, flickering screams of lizard-fire and the paradisiacal yammering of
truetruetrue!
His pity is a hammer splitting my skull, silver knob bursting through a firework display of blood and bone, spurting upwards, cerebral ejaculate, bang crash of fontanel puckering and blowing high as a whale’s spume. The brain exposed, that Labyrinth of twisting pink flesh, wrinkled as an old man’s belly, and it is really all belly, all gut, the depth from which it rises, madness and sublimity, from the Center, from the Devouring-Place, from the primordial swimming cauldron of murky stew-self.

I claw at the Road, ripping my fingernails and chipping teeth. I have fallen,
downdowndowndowndown.
The Monkey moves his long brown fingers over my forehead in a tender circling motion, calming, consoling, cooling the fever blistering the peaceful azure sky of skin. His voice is soft as rain:

“
Within the bowels of these elements,

where we are tortured and remain for ever,

The Labyrinth hath no limits,

nor is circumscribed in one self place;

for where we are is the Labyrinth,

and where the Labyrinth is, there must we ever be
.

Hoo.”

I slept.

15

The pancreatic morning breaks sickly and yellow.

Again, the thumping body, the hang-over from delirium. This, at least, holds to pattern, grinding millstones in my grisly head, scarlet shame frothing and gurgling like spoiled port, grapes trampled underfoot, stains of burst fruit spreading like sin. As I wake the Monkey is perched bird-like on my chest, picking expertly at my aquamarine hair, grooming me as he would a member of his troop.

“It is poisoning you, the Stone, cyanide in your pretty blue cells,” he informed me with some cheer as he mussed with my curls. I answered sleepily. “It was just a rock. I escaped the Angel. How can it hurt me?”

“Hoo, hoo, Darlingblue!
I
escaped the Angel when I took it from you. You are still within Her. She wanted you mad and gibbering, and you are obliging. It is all going so well. You did not swallow it, so you could not master it. It licked at you like a grassfire. I took it so that you could not conquer it, so that you would follow the path that lunacy has laid out in such profound bricks. If you were your singular body, you could not follow me, tread so heavily this Road. Only the mad are Seekers-After. You are burning, girlchild. It is beautiful to see. The Stone is Doubt. It is Pernicious. You ought to pay more attention, you know. You have lost your eyes and are changing bodies like ball gowns. Were you so malleable and myriad before She came with Her swathes of ice?”

“
Hic monstra delitescunt
. But she cannot be the Villain. There is no Monster at the Center of the Labyrinth, no Minotaur, no Beast. I know it. That is not the meaning of this place. And why would she harm me? Why would you keep me from deliverance?” He nodded sagely. “This is Assassination. You have no choice. It is a game that has been played and played before. This is the Way. There is no Monster. But there are many monsters hereabout, as there are many Centers. You are a monster, I am a monster. She was, and a Center, too. You should have showed her your teeth. Instead she is poisoning you like mistletoe on an oak, because you thought she was beautiful and you let her. Hoo. Now you are very sick, and you will continue to spend your nights speaking in the breakwater tongues of the Labyrinth and clawing at the earth until your bones weather to white on the wide lanes of the Road. Or possibly light blue. As for howandwhy,” he shrugged wheat-shaded shoulders. “She Devours. It is the Way. Can’t you trust that the tale unfolds as it should?” He was contorting his graceful fingers rhythmically, tapping my body like a piano.

“No, I can’t. And how is it you know so much, Beast? Who are you?”

A long, slow smile spread across his features, widening the wrinkled face to a glowing jack o’ lantern. “I am myself and no other. But nothing here is precisely what it is.”

“Ssst!” I snorted, grinning. “I know all that.
Who are you
?” He laid one finger alongside that squat little nose and uttered his syllable.

“Hoo.” The air was suddenly filled with his wild laughter, leaping across the Road and careening off Walls, cavorting and thoroughly enjoying his joke. Catching his breath, he giggled, “Oh, Darlingblue, that was lovely. If you are very, very good and promise not to strangle me during your funny little fits, sometime soon I shall show you my name, then will you know. Until then, mum’s the word.”

The Monkey was off on another fit of hooting acrobatics. “But you,” his voice calmed, became grave, “are in trouble. I would like to help you, very much, very much. But I can’t. My Medicine is not for you.”

And so I was falling again, lost in the newness-which-was-not, lost in waves of golden fur and shining eyes, winks of I-know-what-you-don’t and shrugs of self-satisfaction. Lost, not just strange and Wandering, but diseased and poisoned, asps worming towards my great indigo heart that very, very moment. My voice cracked like a clay pitcher: “Is there nothing to be done?”

The Monkey flicked at a gnat on his saffron pelt. “Oh, please, woman. Of course there is or I would have stayed in my cozy little Temple and let you blather on your way. I merely said
I
cannot help you. Hoo! I can’t do everything, you know. We must find Her again, the Angel. And you must be entirely mad before we do, wholly Devoured, or there will be nothing to give her.”

“It is a Quest,” I said doubtfully.

“No, it is a sequence of events. You will not defeat Her with some Vorpal Blade, or win anything at all from Her. It is not the End, nor can we truly Seek her, as the Labyrinth carries us where it wishes, if it can wish. Will has no meaning here, like everything else. There is no meaning. There is no pagination. There is no index, no glossary. There is no first edition, no reprinting, there is only this battered, dog-eared
now
. There is no gallery, there is no photographic record, there is no grand entrance or dramatic exit. There is only the great nowbody roasted in its sapphire hide, and your great seaside eyes, widening in ineffably slow understanding, rolling weakly into darkness as you are eaten, piece by piece.

It is not a Quest merely because it has a beginning with me and an ending with Her. You are not going to fight, or act, or plead. You can get nothing from Her. She may not heal you, and you cannot force Her. But you must make a circle. You may never find Her. A Quest is Heroic, you are not. You are selfish: you wish only to Survive and Devour. It will not change the Labyrinth, or the fate of a fair-armed damosel. You are the damsel and the dragon, you are the prince and the witch, you are the captain and the whale. ‘Quest’ has no meaning for you, who Seek only the delectable end of your own rattling tail. You are the Seeker-After, so get on with it and Seek.” He folded his arms across his chest.

“It is, really. You are tricking me into it, but it is a Quest, a Journey. I do not want it.”