HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 2)

Ieajaita caught the number 18 bus two blocks from the house. She may as well have hitched a ride with a funeral procession. She refused to look at any of the riders, would not even acknowledge their shade of a presence. She produced from her pocket a tiny volume of Neruda, opened to “If I Forget You,” and read it over and over, until the bus reached the corner of Umber and Thirteenth.

Ieajaita stepped off the bus, and the squalor of spiritual bankruptcy hit Her nostrils like sour milk. She was at the gateway to the Cascades, Madsen’s most prestigious neighborhood. The rat’s nest of affluential squalor was home to salons and athletic clubs and restaurants that catered only to the alleged quality. Each establishment reeked of expenditure, the sole justification for its prices. Every retail outlet was designed and cultivated to provide the most finely wrought, fatuous embellishments for any setting their blinkered, vacant clientele desired. Squire’s specialized in upscale furniture, the kind that was meant to evoke the individual vibrancy of an antique, even boasting of its practice of hand-crafting. But the dishonesty filled Ieajaita’s ears with a toxic white noise. Each block of wood, strip of metal, and globule of blown glass, every piece that came together to make a Squire’s, was crafted by a different automaton. They plucked pieces from different jigsaw puzzles and shaved them to fit a pre-determined mold. Old-world charm via flesh-and-blood assembly line. No Artists necessary, no Truth required.

Ieajaita crossed the street in front of the number 18, her boots striking the grime-slicked asphalt. As the bus squealed away, She took comfort in the ignorance of the Cascades’ clientele. They wouldn’t appreciate The Art if they saw it protesting their heedless vapidity. They had long ago sacrificed what was most beautiful in them on an altar of distraction. Ieajaita chose not to fight the urge to glance at “that wretched gallery” and indulge Her loathing. It was one of many that had sprouted like toadstools around the United States, each owned by the same travesty who dared to call himself an Artist. As She passed it, She remembered when She had sought out the man, compelled by some ineluctable force that eluded Her comprehension to stare into the man’s eyes. Now as the memory bubbled up, She felt foolish for having entertained the possibility that there might have been anything behind those empty divots. All he saw was a funhouse reflection of what he would never be. Self-portraiture as euphemism. Anything to keep from baring his soul.

She passed Le Millésime, a trough of poisons passing for perfumes. She held a handkerchief to Her nose and found herself several millennia away, when fragrances were crafted by miracle workers, not manufactured by chemists. When there was no chemistry, just a collection of half-grasped observations. And before She could stop herself, She remembered Ruut.

There had been no love to lose between Herself and Her Husband, the marriage having been arranged by Uros to tickle His resentment. Ruut’s disrespectful peccadilloes had never bothered Her. They were part and parcel of The Vanfiri, and She had long ago forgiven Ruut for disrespecting Her duty, for the lengths He had traveled to degrade Her acolytes, and the delight He had found by wallowing in Her pain. After all, the virtues of reason and logic were as fundamental to Ruut as sensitivity and empathy were to Her. To exorcise them would be to Unmake The God. But His supercilious dismissal of “entertainments:” that still roused Her ire with apocalyptic intensity.

Ieajaita brushed aside the pointless memory, focused on the task at hand. Her gloved hands in the pockets of Her jacket, she turned left and headed east on Thirteenth. She reached the corner of Vermillion just as the memory threatened a migraine. She looked across the street, to the opposite corner, and breathed easy at the sight of the Fabled Eaves. The greenery rose and curved into a proscenium arch. Beneath it a man and a woman embraced one another. They spoke in turn briefly, their faces close together, peppering their confectionary exchanges with stolen kisses. She could feel the humid residue of Art wafting off them as She passed, entering Truburgh Park.

Elihu Truburgh had for once in his life seen beyond the placebo of legal tender. Despite the blueprints and budget meetings, the scheduling and contracting, despite all the material rigmarole, Truburgh had Created. As She walked the pathway that coursed through the park like a macadam artery, Ieajaita remembered the moment of its conception, the quaking embrace that had ripped through the aether. It had been so long since She’d felt the like of it, those first stimulations from the pangs of birth, so many decisions to still be made, so many possibilities to squander. Terror and ecstasy in simultaneous climax, its echoes still radiating over a century later. From the Madsen Public Library, the heart of the park, to the valleys and glades of children’s games, to Zugzwang Corner and its 1600-square yards of marmoreal checkerboard, the entirety of the public space was infused with Magic.

But the scowl so often present on Her returned. She passed benches filled with people reading books or listening to music on electronic doodads. Playing games with phantoms and against them, necks bowed beneath a digital yoke. Romantic entanglements unknotted by the mutual exclusivity of foreign banalities. Entire conversations conducted in a non-language, committed to immortality in sand, and deposited in vaults guarded by invisible whores. She passed people who surrounded themselves with Magic, then blinded themselves on alien light.

The walk took Ieajaita up a hill, down the other side, and past a wall of green and masonry, before She veered to Her right and entered Busker’s Round. The amphitheater, a famished yawn, appearing as suddenly as the sun can burn away the rain clouds, was a special Creation. The terraces and arcades were verbatim those of the Roman amphitheater in Arles, and the tiered seats and faces of the round were embellished with recreations of the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon. An irrefutable cocktail of imperial majesty and indigenous myth, designed to ensnare and propel the Artist. It was where the Magic gathered, and Ieajaita smiled as the warm rush of manna swept over Her.

Musicians speckled the amphitheater. A clarinetist improvised in one seat. A violinist covered Albeniz’s “Mallorca” in another. A fourteen-year old boy practiced his saxophone in a row to himself, while four classical guitarists huddled together, re-arranging “She’s Leaving Home.” On the stage were two men in their twenties, one standing at a vibraphone, the other seated behind a contraption of PVC pipes of varying length. Everyone played their own tune, with no inclination to share the air. By all logic the breath of Busker’s Round should have been an ear-rending slog. But logic had no place here, and Ieajaita breathed deeply with each step further into and around the amphitheater, her nose filling with the scent of henbane. This was True: musicians, trained or otherwise, playing with full vigor and no regard for audience. This was communion with what can never be known, only felt. A sacrament by way of sonic divination. And the Artists felt it as strongly as Ieajaita, basking in the alchemy of anatomical manipulation and the atavistic here-and-now.

A stalk of wheat with peach fuzz on his lip sat halfway up the western risers, a dulcimer in his lap. As Ieajaita approached, the hammers kissed the strings, unsure of how to proceed. The peach-fuzzed man looked up at Ieajaita, and their loaded glances introduced themselves.

Ieajaita opened Her heart, let the music run its fingers through Her blood, along Her vessels, and feel the Inspiration.

It started as thoughtless tinkling. Not one easy, pre-conceived note. Then the tinkling happened across a rhythm, Common Time in repose. But underneath flowed a gentle air, the unprepossessing current of The Endless River. A phrase formed, a simple figure of a baby’s breath chant. The stalk of wheat played on, sprinkling shorter notes into the ostinato. And the ceaseless reprise poked through The Fabric of the universe, growing into an ongoing ritual.

An oboist drifted into the music’s orbit. She came to rest beside the dulcimer player and was Moved to join in. Her long first notes came moaning from the reed, oblivious to their incorrectness, the untarnished bliss of the undiluted moment. Both Ieajaita and the dulcimer player knew they were perfect. The rhythm was now threatening to break into a gallop. A percussionist materialized and brought the music to a full stride. Others appeared: a flautist, another percussionist sporting a shaku and sasara, a didgeridoo, a Tibetan throat singer from San Juan Capistrano. There were soon over a dozen musicians cloistered within Ieajaita’s Divine penumbra. The music swelled and collapsed into itself, everything drawn to and emanating from The Goddess at its nexus. And the fully-grown ritual blossomed into Magic.

Through Her they felt, lived within, and understood the heart of A God. They were in a vaulted world fever-dreamt by Hieronymus Bosch, surrounded by a churning sea of men in the billowing fashions of some future-bred Frazetta. There were pipers and harpists and cornum players, drummers, poets and playwrights, and dancers, painters, sculptors, illustrators, and actors and musicians, and metalworkers, woodcarvers, and cave painters, and they all filled the air with liquid Imagination. The Fabric rippled away, spiking crests unfolding into barely warbling lines that disappeared through the shimmering veil beyond the mortal spectrum.

Then, from the unseen absence, came monsters, two of them, grotesque rejections of virtue and beauty. They were violations of sanity, a profane dare for mercy. And to their own surprise, the celebrants found themselves inclined to show them mercy. No fear accompanied the beasts’ arrival, even as they appeared alien and undesirable. The celebrants found themselves welcoming them, loving them. And pitying them. The celebrants thought, They shouldn’t be here, / They shouldn’t want to be here, / They know I can grant them Death. / Why won’t they ask me? They wanted to take the monsters’ heads in their laps, pet them and hold them, and whisper kind final words as the monsters fell beyond The End. But pride hoisted the creatures’ heads high as they loosed a diluvian wail. And in the throes of unendurable sorrow the Artists found hope, for the demoniac obscenities still possessed Life, and they refused to surrender it. The sheer will of the abominations spread like an empowering contagion, and in their reflections the celebrants struck newfound strength, surging out of Despair’s lowest depths.

As if notated on staves etched in stone tablets, the musicians arrived in unison at the improvisation’s natural end. The music faded into the feeling of a beloved memory. The musicians turned to each other, marveling at the spontaneous greatness they’d all had a hand in making. Ieajaita smiled as the air over Busker’s Round started to thicken with ego, and she started away.

The wheat stalk with the dulcimer stopped Her. “Hey, hey,” he said, his pleading hand on Her shoulder. “Hey, you were fantastic.”

Ieajaita held up Her gloved hands. “I did nothing.” She turned away.

“Hey, listen,” said the poor, bemused mortal. “You know, I can, uh, I compose too. You know, I have, uh, like, whole symphonies for the dulcimer. Or, I guess, sonatas at any rate. Whatever you want to call them. Doesn’t matter. And it’s not just the dulcimer I play.”

Ieajaita faced him square, pity turning Her mouth up at the corners.

“Piano, harp, handpan. And I’m teaching myself the koto right now. So, you know, if you ever wanted to hear any of it, we could meet back here? Maybe grab a drink after?”

Ieajaita clasped the silly bottom-feeder’s hands. “My dear boy, / Were I so inclined to take you to bed, / we’d already be in transit. / Yet here we stand. / Let’s not pollute our moment with the sully of ambition.” She turned and left the amphitheater.