Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






You Must Make Your Heart Steel

 

 

The winter was cold, but then the spring. It was now six months since the incident at Godfrey Chapel and though only questions remained about that night, they were rhetorical. Because the killing had stopped. How and why was catching a ghost by the tail; the killing had stopped and life in Hemlock Grove went on. The White Tower was light again as ever, but gone was the controlling share of Norman Godfrey. The principal holders are now Olivia Godfrey in trust for her son until his fast-approaching eighteenth birthday and Lod LLC. From time to time Olivia, Dr. Pryce, and a man of imperious girth and military bearing with, on close inspection, a signet ring of a serpent and a cross can be seen strolling the nautilus trail around the institute, on what business beyond enjoying the weather’s pleasant turn is anyone’s guess. For Dr. Godfrey only questions remained, but they were rhetorical. A question is a door and an unopened door is just part of the wall and as long as it’s standing it’s doing its job. The killing had stopped. Upon the lump receipt of Lod’s improbable payment from a Luxembourg account, he put it all into the Godfrey Foundation, stipulating to his wife that whatever it was used to build bear any name but his. Plans were also under way to convert the mill into an interactive industrial museum and learning center, the central attraction an exhibit visit inside an authentic Bessemer converter. (There are rumors it’s haunted.) There were cardinals and goldfinches in the trees and greedy mud on the ground that would suction off a shoe and finally, on the thirteenth of April, after the very last of the long chill, Peter was making up for lost hammock time when a warmth suffused his Swadisthana. He listened to the sound of the wind like the roar of a distant crowd.

 

“Well I’ll be,” he said.

Moments later the phone rang and he went inside. The latest stray raced through the open door into the trailer, a double-wide. He answered the phone to receive a glad piece of news. It was expected; she was due at any moment, but some things can never be expected no matter how much they are.

 

Peter said nothing; being philosophical made him quiet. Fetchit jumped on the kitchen table and mewled. The black ones had a way of finding the Rumanceks’ door. Peter nooked the phone with his shoulder and went to the cupboard and took out a can of tuna.

 

“Well!” said Letha, on the other end of the line. “Sorry, I’m feeding the cat,” said Peter.

“Good to hear you have your priorities straight.”

“Babies have to be born, and cats have to be fed,” said Peter equitably.

 

Now there was a quiet on the other end suggesting he might want to reconsider his response.

 

“Baby,” said Peter, “my heart has no words. Your smile makes flowers grow and your tits could knock a rhino sideways. I love your ass to pieces and anything that pops out of you. This is the best news I’ve had all day.”

“Oh, my chariot arriveth. Catch you on the flip side.”



 

She hung up. It had been agreed that he would not be present for the labor: she felt it was important to be on her own. Peter did not object—he had seen a video of childbirth in biology once and just didn’t


have the stomach for it.

 

Later in the afternoon Peter met Roman at Kilderry Park. A few undergraduates were throwing a Frisbee. Peter and Roman sat on a picnic bench at the pavilion. Roman was wearing the vintage Italian sunglasses that were his latest affectation and produced two cigars. Peter nodded. Nice touch.

 

“Uncle Roman,” said Roman.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” said Peter.

 

Roman handed a cigar to Peter. Peter asked him if he’d made any headway with the Cat Lady and Roman shook his head.

 

Since the abrupt termination of Project Ouroboros in November, Roman had maintained hope of finding some kind of trail to his sister, of whom no sign had been found. No tracks. The latest was a medium to whom Destiny had referred him who operated a cougar sanctuary in West Virginia.

Roman pursed his lips. The Cat Lady had induced a trance in an attempt to communicate with Shelley but wound up falling to the floor in a sort of seizure, whispering incoherently about fate lines and heart lines and unholy communion and the headaches, the headaches, and the cottage was surrounded by low hisses and snarls as her agitation spread among her brood. Roman stuck a pen between her teeth and rolled her into the recovery position and waited for her to come to and escort him to his car without being eviscerated. In parting she apologized that she would not be able to help him—though did not refuse her fee—but instead offered these words: “Still. What she is trying to say is ‘still.’” Roman would have written off the entire expedition as a fool and his money, except that he had been experiencing headaches of increasing severity lately. A heightened photosensitivity of the eyes that forced him to keep his sunglasses on more or less continuously before dusk.

“Dead end,” said Roman.

 

Peter nodded. Both rationally and instinctively he believed Roman’s search to be futile. Shelley was gone. And wherever it was she had gone, there was no looking for her. But he never voiced his pessimism to Roman, nor for that matter was there cause. He doubted Roman himself believed his quest to be anything but quixotic, and on balance it was simply better for him to have something keeping him busy.

 

Roman looked off into the sky at a lance of sun penetrating cloud and was quiet a moment. “I see her sometimes,” he said. “In dreams.”

Peter looked at him. Why was he lying?

“Not in dreams,” Roman admitted. “I’ve been … trying it on myself.”

 

Peter didn’t understand, then he did. The thing they didn’t talk about, because when one friend has this power, not talking about it is a lot easier than talking about it; the paths it can lead down that one virtue of the male sex is an unparalleled lack of curiosity to see where they go. The power behind his eyes, and the meaning of this power.

 

“I look into the mirror, and I tell myself to see her,” said Roman. “I feel her all the time, but I tell myself to see her. And things go dark, and I can feel myself on a threshold, and I don’t know what’s on the other side, where the shadows are. But there’s a light way off. And I know the light is an angel, and the angel is her.

 

“It’s her,” he repeated, as though this had been contested. “She’s out there, and I want to get closer but I can’t. I’m afraid of what will happen if I go too far. Then she starts calling out to me, but she’s so far away and I can only just hear her. What she’s saying is, ‘You must make your heart steel.’”

 

He sat and looked at Peter. Peter fidgeted, uncomfortable. He could sense when Roman was going to bring up that night at the chapel, and though he didn’t mind providing an ear he was himself loath to volunteer anything. In truth he had almost no memory of what happened, and he didn’t want it otherwise. The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on, and he didn’t like dwelling on it. The presentiment of an unpaid debt that he didn’t like dwelling on at all.

“When you did what you did,” said Roman, “how were you not afraid?”


But this was not a question Peter was expecting. At first he was bemused, then he chuckled and shook his head as though at a foreigner’s comical malapropism.

Roman was as baffled as a Chinaman. “What?” he said.

“I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. I could never have done it if I didn’t know you were there too.”

 

They were quiet. Roman looked out at the hills, seven shades of ever flusher and more life-giving green. He shook his head.

“Fucking angels,” he said.

 

* * *

 

Outside, the moon was a boar’s tusk and the owls gave their two cents while in the bedroom there was only the whir of the projector’s motor. There was a white sheet tacked to the wall for a screen and the movie being projected was from the silent era and was black-and-white with a tint of green, as was the fashion of the time to create a sense of mood and mystery. The setting was a soundstage that was not really a soundstage but an expressionistic representation thereof where the shadows cast by the arc light of even the straightest lines fell like a maze of thorn brush. The facsimile of the thing constructed within the thing itself, dream within the feedback loop of the brain. Or vice versa. And within the soundstage a lone player, a woman. She had on the exaggerated eye makeup that was the fashion of the time and nothing else. And alone within this cathedral of ingenuity and infinity she danced. The dancer aching, grieving for the mist-covered mountains of the home she was so far away from, and so far away from returning to, and this dance inelegantly rendered by a shutter speed sixteen frames per second due to the technological limitations of the time, causing a simultaneously increased and halting speed. But the inelegance of the motion only contributing to the poetry of it. Essential truths gained by loss in translation. The essence of beauty not perfection, but the doomed aspiration.

 

Olivia lay in bed and watched, savoring like wine the shared age-old ache in her own bones as on-screen the woman danced the grief of her slow, slow journey home and in turning from the camera revealed her own imperfection. There was on the dancer’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale pinkie-length scar—the remnant of some crude surgery.

 

* * *

 

In his room Peter was awakened by a pang in his groin of such pressing acuity he mistook it initially for the need of a beastly piss, but he had gotten as far as the toilet before he realized it was not his own bladder he had felt but a different plane of signal altogether. He stood there dumbly, appurtenance in hand, waiting for a flash flood or a meteor or whatever it was that could have caused so profound an agitation within his Swadisthana. But then he realized, and then the phone rang. He did not go to answer it. He stood there knowing. It continued to ring until eventually Lynda picked up. He heard her answer and then she just listened. Her end of the conversation simply a hushed “Oh no oh no no no oh no.” He tucked himself in his boxer shorts and gathered up his ponytail in one hand and with the other opened the cupboard and reached for a pair of scissors. He put the toilet seat down and sat, releasing the fistful of hair so it scattered to the floor as footsteps approached the door and he waited for the gentle, gentle knock.

 

* * *

 

Pryce received a call informing him of the disturbance in the OR and gave the order not to get in the way. He turned and stood at his office window and looked up at the night and stars.

“Where are you?” he said.


He pressed his fingertips against the window, the cool of the glass. “Why did you leave us all to her?” he said.

 

Soon there was a sound at his office door not of knocking but a brute and insistent kicking. He opened the door and in the hall stood Dr. Godfrey. In his arms was a sheeted bundle. His eyes were stained as red as the sheet in his arms.

 

“Do it,” said Godfrey. Pryce said nothing.

“Bring her back, Johann,” said Godfrey. “Norman, come in and sit down,” said Pryce.

 

“You need to bring her back,” said Godfrey. “Do whatever you need to. Just bring her back.” “Norman, what say we sit down and talk about this?”

 

“She’s getting cold! Bring her back. You think I’m being irrational but I’m not. I will write you a check for any amount you can imagine. Bring her back to me.”

 

“Norman,” said Pryce. He stepped into the hall and reached to take the bundle from his arms. Godfrey jerked away with hot feral eyes.

 

“Norman, give her to me,” said Pryce. “You’ll do it?” said Godfrey. “Norman, let me have her,” said Pryce. Godfrey was reluctant, but complied. “You’ll do it now,” said Godfrey.

 

Pryce waited until his hold was secure before answering. “No,” he said.

 

Godfrey was quiet. The crazed inspiration that had sent him on this mission was suddenly and completely extinguished. Other fires went out now too. He eased himself against the wall and slid to the floor.

 

“She’s too old, Norman,” said Pryce. “What about the baby? I may have a chance with the baby.” Godfrey addressed his knees. The square fluorescents reflected off the floor down the hall, a long row

of molars.

“Fuck the baby,” he said.

Pryce took the bundle into his office and laid it on the floor. He pulled aside the sheet and looked into the face, which had contracted into a mask of the mocking ugliness of death. He called Hemlock Acres and told them to send a car, then came into the hall, locking the door behind him, and sat on the floor next to Godfrey. He inhaled the smell of disinfectant. He had never understood before why people didn’t like that, the way hospitals smell. He had never known before how comfortless it could be.

 

“I’m sorry, Norman,” said Pryce. “I’m not God.”

 

* * *

 

Olivia insisted she drive although Roman was what is called holding up. But she knew it was not only deceptive but more dangerous. She knew about holding up. He had at least gotten sleep—she had doctored the vodka with several tablets of Ambien—and she had sat at his bedside like she had months ago during that god-awful business with the little dead lesbian. When he woke she asked where he would like to go and was relieved when he simply said “Peter.” Pryce had phoned her the night before and she had enough on her hands; she wasn’t ready yet for Norman. She had priorities.

 

As they drove in silence, Olivia debated whether or not to warn him but decided against it. He could only hate the messenger regardless of how much more the messenger loved him than anyone else ever could. There was nothing that could make this easier on him, no matter how much it harrowed her heart to be reduced for the present to chauffeur, bearing him to a destination where he had no suspicion what he


would find, what he wouldn’t. He sat next to her, holding up. She reached and touched his face. He flinched; the one thing his inner heart did not want now was to be touched, but she did not remove her hand. A mother has certain rights, and when a person can’t be consoled, sometimes irritation will have to suffice to remind him that you’re here, you are right here. They passed the park and turned down the lane.

As Olivia predicted, when they reached the Rumanceks’ plot the car was gone and the trailer door hung open; they had not bothered to shut the door behind them. They stepped out and Roman looked mildly befuddled as though searching for a puzzle piece that was not in the box. Then his eyes overfilled with sudden awful knowing. The obvious she could not prepare him for: that a Gypsy was a Gypsy was a Gypsy. They will steal the rings off your fingers or the love right out of your heart and leave no more to show for it than a trail of smoke in the night. But she said nothing as the full weight of it came on in, taking admittedly small satisfaction in being, naturally, right. But only very small. How ill matched the boy was for this enemy!—death was one thing, quite involuntary for the most part. But desertion. There was no destroyer of worlds quite to match it. She reached to the small of her back and lightly traced the ridge of her scar through her blouse.

Many years ago Olivia had been a young girl in the land beyond the forests and the uglier of two sisters. Hers was not the kind of lack of beauty that suggested the promise of something unrealized but a drab androgyny that when placed beside her sister’s loveliness was a perverse joke. And the punch line, at the base of her spine and extending about the length of a long thumb: her tail. But she had always been a happy child nonetheless, a gentle spirit who could lose entire afternoons wandering through a valley of sunflowers singing to herself, and much protected by her father and elder sister who believed the heart of the world could not extend charity to so simple and homely a girl.

 

But their great love could not prevent their fear from coming to pass, and in her thirteenth year Olivia had her first taste of the suffering from which she had been shielded for so long. His name was Dimitri and he was a slave. It was standard at the time for the aristocracy, and no name was older or more vaunted than her father’s, to possess numerous Gypsy slaves, and it was something she had never put any more thought into than their horses or pigs. For it to occur to even so gentle and sensitive a spirit to hold an opinion on the thought of owning people like horses or pigs would have required it to occur to her that Gypsies were in fact people—a notion not even a child could take seriously. But then Dimitri. Which is not to say that the purchase of this slave suddenly clarified the issue of taxonomy but rather complicated it infinitely. Not so much that she realized that Dimitri was a man no different from her father or his friends, but that he was a creature quite unlike any other man or Gypsy she had ever encountered.

 

Olivia’s father bought Dimitri for the unthinkable sum of two oxen, for which entire families might be purchased. But he was indeed an unparalleled specimen: it was not as if his shoulders or his thighs were near as stalwart as the ruminants for which he was traded, or his mind or beauty of any remark; it was a particular talent famed throughout the mountains that commanded him such a price. For being a member of a race of dance and song, Dimitri had a way with the fiddle to make the devil stomp his feet.

 

This is a story older than stories. From the first time the little girl who loved songs witnessed the Gypsy slave give a demonstration of his instrument, her tail wagged. Olivia, who along with her sister possessed the finest things of any girl in the land, had never felt the jealous pain in her soul of wanting a thing all her own until seeing through her own watered eyes the fingers on that wooden swan neck. But Dimitri, inconveniently, was no gift for her, nor an extravagance on her father’s behalf for aesthetics as its own justification. Dimitri was her sister’s dowry.

 

Olivia’s heart was like a hand towel wrung by a strongman. She was devoted to her family and would never have ranked her own happiness of greater import, but with Dimitri it was not a question of happiness so much as the unique breed of misery that is first love, which she no more could have voluntarily abdicated than ceased her own heart through force of will. And so the girl whose gentle spirit had always been as dull as her face did the unprecedented. She defied the law of the land and her blood


and she stole him.

 

Dimitri, who was a genius of young girls’ hearts the same way even the most doltish of musicians are, needed no explanation when his new master’s daughter unlocked his quarters and led him silently through an ancient catacomb that let out in the mountainside with two horses she had left in waiting. They rode all the day and all the night, not resting until they came to a river far away enough that there was no danger of a search party catching up. Dimitri took his unlikely deliverer into his arms and petted her hair on the riverbed. They had hardly exchanged two words except necessarily conveyed instructions the entire flight, but he told her they would have to sleep; much running still awaited them. But sleep was unthinkable! Now that they were here, of course, the process must be commenced of him learning every last little thing about her; no time could be lost in so urgent and comprehensive an undertaking. However, as the toll of the last two nights caught up with her and the Gypsy’s magical hand stroked her she was lulled into the peaceful realization that time in fact stretched ahead of them in an endless meadow full of sunflowers now that she possessed him all to herself.

 

When she awoke at daybreak to the tittering of tree creepers, Dimitri, both horses, and the rings on her fingers were gone.

 

Olivia searched the riverbed until she found a piece of slate with an edge like a clamshell. She hitched up her skirt. She looked up and opened her mouth to join the tree creepers with her favorite song but fuck it, fuck songs and where they came from.

 

When the search party came across her the following day, she lay face forward and unmoving. Her skirt, bunched at her waist, had soaked so much blood it looked from a distance like a bunch of rose petals. One hand was outstretched and in its limp fingers what may have been a pale pickle.

Time passed. And something happened to the girl—the light of innocence in her eyes was lost as the face of unpromising homeliness around it rearranged into one of unpleasant beauty. It took nine months for this transformation to be complete, and at the end of it she looked at the newborn girl-child in her father’s arms through a mask of cruel perfection.

 

“We will say she is your sister’s,” he said. She was then married, and it would bring dishonor to no one.

“The blood of a slave makes a slave,” said Olivia. “Give it to the swineherd.”

So the child was taken to the swineherd, the old Rumancek, whose low name the tainted bloodline would forever bear, and Olivia informed her father she would be going to the academy in the city, to learn the dramatic arts.

 

Presently, she stood by as Roman walked shakily to the front door and entered. She waited. There was a hum not far from her ear. Her arm darted and snatched a fat, ambling bumblebee from the air and she mashed it in her palm, dropping it to her feet. She regarded the small pink weal it had left and dug her nail in, scraping the stinger out. She waited. Then it came: from within the trailer the cry of the left-behind. She stood where she was as the cry rose at the immensity and grandeur of this desolation; she waited as the boy’s pathetic howl went on, and on, and her heart howled right along with it.

 

She was here, she was right here.

 

* * *

 

A,

 

For a week he hardly left his room. The silence down the hall, I will always hear it echo. What a trial for even this battleworn heart! Could anything be more selfish than a mother’s love? But how can they be strong if we are not? A satisfactory answer eludes …

 

He was apathetic to Norman’s release into our custody, or at least the shell that vaguely responds to Norman’s name. Such a pity. I loved the man, make no mistake about that. That sublime bitch of an irony that in the conquest of one heir to the Godfrey dynasty I would fall in


love with the other. Unthinkable! So I finally share a roof with father and son. At least what is left of the father. Perhaps in time he will recover; he isn’t made of sugar candy. But at any rate my nights will be less cold. To think, after all this fuss and bother over the years his defection aroused not so much as a moo from his old cow (her late defeat a not insignificant consolation prize; I have had the unique privilege of being around long enough to see all my rivals get ruined or get fat, but I can’t name a single instance more satisfying). And scarcely more reaction from our child than if I’d acquired a new houseplant.

 

I did not interfere; I sat with his grief with brutal compassion but purpose held. We come from a motherland that has never conquered another, or repelled an invader from either direction, and yet here we stand. We do what is necessary. And it was only a week until his birthday. After all this time, no time at all. A bit arbitrary I suppose to wait until that exact date, but things must have a proper sense of proportion; I have no greater contempt than for those mothers who submit to having the stockings raided on Christmas Eve. And finally the night in question!—I had such butterflies I wouldn’t have been surprised to find my feet lifted from the ground, but as Papa was sure we learned, haste is of the devil, and dutifully I placed Norman in the extaz for fear that the program of the evening would physically kill him. (How old were we before mastering the extaz? And Roman an adept by seventeen? My hair tingles.) I then knocked on Roman’s door and requested he join me in the attic in several minutes.

Imagine the mise-en-scène! He had not noticed the renovation: the room now bare of furnishing after going untouched all those months, the flicker of ninety-nine black candles in a circle around the altar stone, and atop the stone: the bassinet. The incomprehension in the boy’s eyes, the old—are we possibly so old?—wisdom in his mother’s.

 

He stood in speechless soliloquy. I held his face in my hands and his eyes with mine and released him, by extaz released him from the unknowing it had been necessary to hold him in until this moment. All those secrets, whispers of a dream, now revealed. Finally!—no more secrets: it was time for us to be whole again and I gave him everything at once. How horrendous had been my ordeal—so many years and tears, so many hopes and frustrations for one womb, wasted efforts disposed of with a disconsolate shake—until finally he came! My miracle, swaddled in that luminous red caul that I peeled from his wrinkled skin myself and consumed in one swallow with humblest gratitude. How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license. How all those times Roman found me unkind, the wearying old cunt I found myself playing, it was only, always, out of a mother’s love of her most precious treasure (well, perhaps on occasion because of what a little shit he could be). How there was not nor ever had been an “angel,” the fanciful by-product of a terminally birdbrained imagination, nor for that matter had he ever in fact had a cousin—how the Godfrey who supplied his name was not the same who supplied his blood, and that nine months ago Letha Godfrey was visited by her own brother, incapable of managing the dark tides within him. (Boys will be boys!) And here the product of that impetuous union, far from stillborn, lying asleep not ten paces away.

 

I continued looking into his eyes, smiling in the hope that he would know that no matter how bitter the medicine his mother would be there with a spoonful of sugar to follow. But I’m afraid he rather had the countenance of the cartoon coyote who has just realized he has stepped off a precipitous cliff. In silence, he turned his back to me and sat on the top stair with a creak, listlessly allowing his weight to fall into me and resting his face on my thigh.

 

Just then the baby woke and began to cry as a tremble ran through Roman’s body. You and I both know how hard it is, just as he knew in the heat of his blood what came next. He encircled my legs with his arms and clung closer, shaking now through and through, and brace your heart,


he fought. He was a handful of iron shavings flung at a magnet. He felt the pull, but he fought it. This culmination, there was not a stray moment in his life that was not a step on the path to right here. All the time I was bringing him here. He squeezed the hem of my dress and began to whisper to himself. The same words over and over but I could not hear what they were. I waited and his pain flowed through me, but I knew that this was a necessary passage and that he would be overtaken soon enough, as we all are.

 

Suddenly he stood and stumbled to the window. A tad disheartening, I must profess—I had thought there would be more fight than all that. How I underestimated him! He braced himself with both hands and looking into his own eyes summoned the hardest stuff in him, repeating more loudly now what he had been telling himself: You must make your heart steel. I realized: he was trying use the extaz on himself! My prodigy! I glowed with pride even as the precocious failure of this strategy set into his posture and at last he turned to me. He asked why I was doing this.

 

But he knew. The heart’s compass finds its true north. The blood is the life. “All I want in the world is what’s best for my baby,” I said.

 

He looked at me and scraped from the bottom of his resolve. “You don’t win,” he said.

 

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a small tin container. He opened the container and took out a small razor blade. He pressed the blade into the vein of one forearm and slashed it from elbow to wrist, and then repeated this with the other arm. He slumped against the wall and looked down at himself as the life pulsed out of him. It did not find its way to the floor but rather climbed the wall around him to form the most excellent incandescent wings.

My baby was flying!

 

Finally his head fell and I went to him. I pulled him to my lap and closed his eyes and held my fingers to his lifeless neck. I sang to him, the same way I would sing to our sunflowers to make them blossom. And so it happened: life thundered in my fingers and those eyes opened anew and my own precious sunflower blossomed. He looked up at me. All ambivalence and abhorrence now gone from his eyes. He knew. I held out my hand and he rose. Hand in hand we stood before the bassinet. The child now peaceful as he looked up at his father. Blood of blood. I released Roman’s hand and stood back as the flesh of my arms rose. I could hear it in his veins. It was happening. I stood witness to the most delicate miracle of creation. Never in my life had I better earned a cry. So I bawled and he Became, forged as is needful for our kind in the furnace of incommunicable loss, at last at last at last his virgin fangs descending—such fangs! as white and perfect as an angel’s, and he lowered his head into the bassinet to drink.

To think!—how those bleating chattel refer to us in epithet: the tragic absurdity one could be in a more perfect condition and happier with God unalive than undead!

Soon,

O

 

* * *

 

Still. You must make your heart still.



Date: 2016-01-05; view: 627


<== previous page | next page ==>
Wisdom Is Where the Brain Meets the Heart | The Boy Who Made Water of Ribbons
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2025 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.024 sec.)