ODD? (12 page)

On her way out, she stops before the oval mirror to smooth a stray wisp of hair.

March 1975

Rhomb

It has but one side. Try to turn it over and (if what they say is true) it will disappear, never to be seen or felt or looked through again. Four edges
—
a bare outline of the abstraction itself
—
become one, and that’s the end of it.

Up until now there has been no question of an anti-Rhomb. Tonight, for the first time, the possibility exists.

1

You close your eyes. Turn it over in your hand. Feel it— four pinpricks in the bunching skin of your palm. The instant you open your eyes it will have vanished.

No one has ever risked the chance of losing the Rhomb. No man ever dared to open his eyes once he had turned it blind-side up. Yet, rising to what can only be termed a private challenge, you tell yourself it’s nothing after all but an odd-looking slice of tinted quartz or a sliver of amber. You recall the common housefly preserved in a cube of amber long before caves were houses, and an image (a complex or a simple image, it matters little) spins out of that fly’s transparent wings.

2

You begin to wonder. Is it the Rhomb or that antediluvian fly—not the one that already exists in an obscure natural history museum, but the one you have
created
for the Rhomb—that triggers the maiden images?

They come less vividly now: the women I (or the Rhomb) have imagined, less beautiful; the trees and sky—even the rocks, whether boulders or pebbles half buried in the river bed or under some hypothetical pile of rubble—less of the gem-like color I had gotten used to. Or maybe
because
I had become accustomed to the images I grew bored and began to weigh my one alternative.

3

When you stare at the Rhomb you stare at nothing. The Rhomb sees for you. It puts your eyes to sleep.

Who can say for certain that the anti-Rhomb does not exist? The paradox is readily apparent. As long as I keep my eyes closed I can feel the four angles pricking my hand, even after I have turned up the so-called blind, or nonexistent, side.

4

But if, when I open my eyes, the anti-Rhomb has vanished without a trace . . . One side only. I turn it over.

Four pale imprints, each no larger than a pinprick, redden on my open palm.

May 6, 1975

Feuillet au Livre du Coeur d’Amour épris (ca.1465)

Snuff out the candle, Jehan, And take the warmer from the coverlet, for I would lie abed. Sing naught to me of Summer winds that tear the blossom from the bough and murder Spring. I am weary of all that, and pine to quit this world.

Put the candle on the floor. Snuff it out. And let us sing no more of her Sweet Face.

1

Rene, his hair tucked in a linen skullcap, sinks back into the canopied depths, pulling the curtains around him.

The wall flickers, green to blue above a well-worn shadow-bench, colors of the Archer’s wings as he descends, catching sight of his own face lit from beneath in the cabinet glass.

2

Rene dreams. First the four lines, then her body’s image. Exceeding faire / Of face and heire / Whose circles / Passeth all compare.

Jessonde with her back to him. All her whiteness come to an almost transparent gray in these shadows.

3

The rug and parquetry, all now that catch the guttering flame. He has pushed the candle under the bench to make a tunnel of light.

Then he stoops to open the curtains. Rene lies on his side, cheek propped in his hand, staring but not awake. Turning the coverlet down, the Archer is a shadow on Rene’s face, a gold-limned silhouette between the sleeper and the wall.

4

The tip of the arrow makes a little dent in Rene’s skin. The Archer draws a bloodless seam in the sleeper’s flesh, opens the warm flap and reaches in, without having heard the footsteps, without having felt the heat of another’s breath on his neck. The Man in White taps his arm, and he turns with the heart of Rene in his hands.

They are frozen thus: Rene, the Archer, and the Man in White—who may be Jehan, or perhaps Rene.

May-June 1975

Return

Somewhere, a piece of dust. The background absolutely black. No, blue. I assume he’s looking down at it, his eyes more than slightly crossed, since the speck, a fuzz-gray wisp curled in on itself (he is that close), seems to lie in repose. Unless his eyes are moving with it. He keeps it at the very center of his field of vision, locus of all lines converging on infinity. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that he has always been able to do it when drunk, to get away with tracking his gaze over the edge of the wainscot or, from his bed, along the commissure of ceiling and wall. It is likely, but not possible.

So it drifts then, this particle of dust. It floats through blue air without seeming to have gone anywhere at all. He moves with it. Not just his eyes. The speck takes him. He has the sensation of following after it, of the floor abandoning the soles of his shoes, intermittently, as he bends his knees. The right, then the left, the right again . . . He makes a turn. Blue, was it? Brighter now. Other shapes. Vague forms behind the dust. More than one speck, neutralized, disappears or blends with something that is still indistinct. Something that hasn’t moved.

1

He walks toward the door. No walls to be seen but the one. The ceiling, if it’s there at all, lost behind a shadow. The door is soft, yielding to the pressure of his hand. Fingers, thumb and palm unstick with a moist hiss no louder than a whisper, leaving their hollows in the wood.

The ceiling is low behind the door. When he opens the door the row of lights, a double track of fluorescent tubes above the corridor, is enough to blind him. Some of the tubes pulse and flicker erratically; almost a third of them have already gone dead gray. No one has bothered to replace them. They are all waiting for the rest of the tubes to burn out. Then it will be over. No more work. No more forms to fill out. Nothing to sign. It will happen, sooner or later. But before that he is standing in front of one of the desks that line both sides of the corridor, waiting for the clatter of typewriter keys, sliding carriages and bells to die down. The woman behind the desk—gray, unkempt hair, bifocals strung to a thin brass chain, like all the others— goes on with her typing, though there is nothing left to type. She and the others believe they know why he is here. None of them had ever dreamed he would get this far. Already, almost two pages have been wasted on nothing. She begins to improvise as she goes along. Soon she is not even typing recognizable words.

2

The breathing apparatus; just tell me where I can find the breathing apparatus, he says. But she goes on typing without looking up. Typing: the breathing apparatus just tell me where . . . It’s in a room (perhaps a janitor’s closet) in the dark, looming through cobwebs behind empty pails, drums half eaten away by rust, rags and tins of disinfectant, behind leaning joists and mops.

He isn’t there. It’s in the dark, and the door hasn’t been opened for months. He doesn’t see any of it. “Just tell me where it is.

3

I’m looking for someone. A woman. Do you know anything about it? A woman kept alive by the breathing apparatus. She’s not particularly tall or short. The color of her hair . . . Her eyes. Let me think. Some special feature . . . It’s no good, I can’t remember.”

The gray-haired woman does not look up. Maybe he will be gone before she runs out of paper. By then they will all be gone.

4

Maybe by now he will have found his way to the room where the walls are faint with pictures. The maze of walls. A small window letting in the light where he will be alone. Just the wickerwork matting of a rug without the nap. Warp and woof. Grayish piles. Ashes at the bottom of the walls. He remembers. He remembers nothing. I am the one who remembers.

June 1975

LOTOPHAGI

Edward Morris

Edward Morris lives in Portland, Oregon, and has been nominated for both the Rhysling Award and the British SF Association Award. “Lotophagi” was reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s
Year’s Best Horror
series.

When I wrote the following pages, or most of them, it was 2002. I lived in the woods, twenty miles from the nearest store, seven miles upland from the nearest mailbox, three miles from the nearest land-line telephone.

If you believe the stoners in Washington, there really are trolls in the Seattle steam-tunnels. The whole Northwest is legendary for the Americanized Yeti of the Sasquatch Nation. The filmic hoax of Bigfoot was no more or less than the Left Coast branch of the Alamagoosalum of New England, themselves mossy scions of the Midwestern Jackalope, kissing cousins of the Texan Chocolocco and Chupacabra, the far-branched family tree limb of the Jersey Devil . . .

And fuck you, too. There are forests where Man trying to protect the environment is utterly irrelevant. Those forests are the ones that people Don’t Go In. Or if they do, not all of them makes it out.

Pandora was nineteen. Her parents told me she was nineteen. Then they slammed the door in my face. After that, I drove all night to the first strip club I found open at 8:00 a.m., and drank myself into a motel. Later Days, as we used to say at Aeolus Farm. Later Days, and better lays . . .

I went to the woods when I dropped out of college, down that miles-long potholy driveway where, as in the rest of the Willamette Region, enterprising land barons imported half the native flora from other worlds than this . . . I went to the mountains, to the old growth of the Cascade Range. I went to learn their ways.

I cast back my mind to 2002 and I’m right there, with flowers everywhere, flowers in Pandora’s weird honey hair. I’m right there, in the stinky, grubby shades of humanity bickering in tiny close quarters.

Bickering around all the parts of Outside that made it in to our little cultural reservation, in every hut and yurt, every hurt, wrapped in pillowcases and socks, the unnumbered poppets of Maya let loose to lay waste inside the wire, and eggs. . .

I went to the woods because I wished to die, to shuck off the last vestiges of civilization long before some stump-jumper found my bones. I went to the woods to abandon my origins and be claimed only by the loving arms of the forest mast, To slough off the life I squandered back in the city.

Back in that one-room palace on Burnside Boulevard, where the outsides of the windows were always black with soot. Back when I was still puzzled, waiting for a future that never happened, shoveling through Augean stables of horseshit just because someone told me there was a pony underneath.

Back in the ten seconds when I tried to begin again, and choked. Back in the darkness before Real Life.

I started looking for a village, that year, remembering stories from a Haitian girl I knew in school, about the Leaf Doctors who work for the Green Man, and protect the forest from all harm . . .

I think about the drowsy, rooty, mossy way any forest calls you to go to sleep in the daytime, find a bed of pine boughs and whatever else is handy, and get out of the light, get out of the day, root down into Mother Earth like a cicada, and
change
 . . .

And what rough imago, all the while, slouching past your camera, turns its head at the flash of change, while the whales beach, and the seas leach  . . .

Sometimes, when you go looking for a village, what you find is the Island of the Lotus Eaters, like the one in
The Odyssey
or
The Iliad
or whichever the fuck one it was we had to read back at Our Lady. In my foggy memory, on the bank of the stream, Mountain Grrl washed clothes on a flat rock and spun rumors out the needle-exchange of her summer wasp mouth and Liza Minelli nose, that Goo had warrants out for his arrest, or he was a sex offender or some dumb damn thing.

She was the first of the droves to leave. She never said goodbye. I’m glad.

You see how
weird
I got out there? What it did to me now, when I try to explain what happened? You probably don’t. Not yet.

But I’m the only one who made it off that co-op alive.

The last night. The last night I was there.

Comma, damn it.

My new California Grrl (twelve years my junior, with her silver eye shadow and big black spiral earrings and rather athletic ways of nearly killing her old man in bed) wants me to write about the last night at the Aeolus Co-Op Farm.

Sonia doesn’t understand. I haven’t explained much. Like why I was such a recluse, then, or how seventy people could just disappear and the cops not give a fuck. They were just dirty hippies, I want to tell her. They weren’t people. Not to the law.

I remember lying on moldy sleeping bags, on my last night at the co-op. I remember dreaming about the face on the stone that Portland State University dragged out of the Columbia River down at Sauvie Island.

That round-eyed, inhuman face, neither condemning nor condoning, natural as a cloud. Impersonal, yet entirely predatory, in the cast of its filed teeth, the jut of its cannibal belly.

I remember seeing the Columbia Stone in the Portland Art Museum just last year, when I made myself go back for a friend’s opening there. I remember having to go back to the hotel and

and take a Xanax. I remember wondering if there was ever human blood spilled across that great stone face.

I remember waking up throwing up. I haven’t been back to the museum. I go to AA instead. It’s big down here. It doesn’t really help, but it gives me something else to look at . . .

I want to remember the way it got dark so quickly, even on the edge of the edge of Portland, after the November monsoons. We had every dwelling cold-proofed and rain-proofed, an activity that the summer months were
for
, by mutual consent and to the mutual way of thinking. (That part needed no infighting to accomplish, and fast.)

Every dwelling, too, had its own deadwood or peat fires going in the little scrounged stovepipe flues we had set up one to a room, made from fifty-gallon drums and spare parts. Waking up in the darkness there all those nights, I always felt as though I was eight again, sleeping over at my Gramma’s, on the hide-a-bed in the living room by the old wood stove . . .

I remember the way it snowed a good foot or two both years I was there, weird for Oregon even in winter. A.J. made some noises about climate change when he was trying to start up the old Willys Jeep we called Furthur. Furthur’s radiator apparently suffered massive reflux at the onset of the first blizzards that fell hard upon the land, and took it by surprise.

I remember that A.J. bought most of the weed I grew. I remember that he was all right. Italian, I think. He talked with an East Coast accent. Never said where he came from. But I remember him. I do . . .

I remember there were flowers breaking into bloom everywhere on Aeolus Farm that cold, cold spring the year after we incorporated, out at the edge of the Eighty-Second Avenue Miracle Mile toward Boring on the Springwater Electric Railway, out past the Rhodie-Gardens and golf courses, out where Portland starts to become Something Else.

Flowers everywhere, flowers on the violet-clad roof down below the tree, housing the longhouse structure that Big Scott, our token Polynesian, called the
falé
, where people slept most of the time. The
falé
smelled like sex and weed and was generally first-come first . . . whatever you were into, because it had the softest-built beds.

Aeolus was regularly hailed by the armchair anthropologists of the Downtown Weekly papers as an experiment in sustainability, since Deuce Longbow’s family bought the land with that purpose and then traipsed away off to Tahiti to die of ingesting some unknown psychedelic, to hear wild-eyed Deuce (or Douche, as some of us came to know the titular oligarch of the collective) tell it.

Douche, of the mad composer hair, and the Gore-Tex clothes he wore until they stunk like rabid, rutting goat, like . . . Mountain Grrl. But I couldn’t think about Mountain Grrl. That wasn’t always her name, and she didn’t always stink.

She used to bathe, like me, and wear weird oils like me, and wash her dreadies a few times a week to keep the bugs out. She was the farm’s Chief Engineer, and I was their pet journalist. Everyone dug in their heels when we broke up. No one wanted to leave.

I still remember her the way she was, kneeling on the bank of the stream, washing clothes on a flat rock, spinning rumors out the needle-exchange of her summer wasp mouth and Liza Minelli nose, that Goo had warrants out for his arrest, or he was a sex offender or some dumb damn thing.

(She was the first of the droves to leave. She never said goodbye. I’m glad.)

Deuce came down out of his ivory tree-sit tower pretty quick and put a whole new kink in that situation: Him. (The Frankenstein monster of a relationship that resulted when they got together almost put me off women for good, but Moth was no better.)

Deuce, of the big yompin Herman Survivor boots that steamed with pig manure from the two pot-bellied pigs that fertilized the back strawberry patches. (They stank about as much as the composting outhouses, which was barely at all.)

Deuce who kept up the sauna that a long ago “villager” named Jukka had dug into the side of the hill and made of fitted rock, and cob. Deuce, who liked bugs so much he almost socked me for killing a hornet when I was making the earthwork around the picking-garden.

He kept saying this word
Ahimsa, Ahimsa
. I kicked him in the balls, and down he went. Big Scott had to pull us apart and waddle us down the trail until we decided we were done. It felt like Deuce let him do it. Maybe he did.

Deuce was a touchy one. When I was first initiated onto that land, I saw his hyper-vigilance as a good thing. Like how he’d always finish people’s sentences, and be right.

But after a while, I started to wonder. A lot. After a while, I started to hang wards around my hut, and sleep with a machete I made myself, one that I sharpened on a rock for one and one half weeks. I counted. I waited. I hardly slept. I was getting out.

That machete got me out. I don’t like to talk about that. Not even in Group, or at meetings. But I remember. Oh, I do. . .

“Didn’t you used to be a Trustafarian?” I remember asking Moth, who was breaking up a big bag of marijuana buds and taking the seeds out before he left my hut with two dozen eggs’ worth of ditch-weed. “Didn’t you used to go to school? What the fuck are any of us even
doing
?”

Moodily, I chewed the strip of beef jerky almost forgotten in my right hand, looking at the waterlogged old Samuel R. Delany paperback I wasn’t really reading since Moth interrupted me with his knock. Moth made a gesture with one small surgeon’s hand that meant he was going to swat me, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

I kept looking out the loophole window in the front door, thinking about his willing replacement Pandora, when we made sweet squeaky love in the milk shed and her hot, slithery cunt yanked my cock to shuddering orgasm in sinuous waves, greater and greater each time . . .

What was this? Every time I started thinking about real things, there’d be some intrusion like that . . . I had enough to do out here that I just stopped thinking, for longer and longer periods. But as the Poet said, the hook brought me back.

Like I was starting to know my place in the hunt. Like I was starting to become worthy to hunt, and eat, and feed on the lesser beasts that we could now herd . . .

Oh, my dreams were getting strange, and the thoughts in my own head ran far off course with no brain-mouth clutch in the way, sitting in the Delphic cave of my hut when I wasn’t out chopping brush or sowing corn.

“ . . . You know? Like, how people back in Maya,” Moth used words like that like he was reading them from a book he held in his hands, and that irritating little smile never quit flipping up the corners of those big cock-sucking lips. “Civilization, whatever, they never mean it when they say How’s It Going. They don’t really fucking care. Do you?”

I shrugged. “Like sex and checks and special effects, child, it all depends on position and circumstance.”

Moth frowned, his designer eyes that weren’t contacts narrowing. “Eww. Meat.” He was looking at the strip of beef jerky in my free hand. “You know that stuff rots for four years in your colon?”

I barely looked up. “Seems like you eat meat quite a bit.” Moth blushed, and looked hurt. I knew I’d gotten to him. But I was getting really tired of the Come To Jesus meetings. About the only things he was good at were in bed. For some reason. But that, too, got old fast.

“Deuce . . . he told me once that he wanted to start a school for children and just . . . bend them to his will. And that if the aliens took over, he’d sign on with them.” Moth’s sea-blue eyes seemed to shine with their own light of fear. “And he was totally straight up. I was like ‘Oh, ha-ha, Deuce made a funny—’“ The smile was instantly gone. “And he’s just like, ‘No. What you got to say?’“

But Moth left, too. Bound for Parts Unknown, Boring or Forest Grove or homeless on Hawthorne and singing for his supper, or maybe mumbled bones eaten cleaner than wolves could do, clutched by thumbs not quite thumbs . . .

But no one talked about that. At Aeolus we talked, talked, talked everything into the ground, ground, ground, in the weirdest, most stilted vocabulary-by-committee I ever heard. Except things like that. The things that were too terrifying.

It all seems like a dream now. Like someone else’s summer job.

All I wanted was a hole in the ground to hide in, and a little time to think. I carved out my tiny chicken-coop of space from a sod hut and a hollow tree behind it, into a cozy outpost of words and images in the forest, drawing on home-stretched vellum and birch bark paper, writing the kind of poems I never thought I could.

Until four members of the co-op (and how that word looks like ‘coop’ to me even now) disappeared.