DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 1)

I broke into a sprint as soon as I saw Uncle Mason’s car pull up to the front door. He’d been in Hong Kong on business and come straight from the airport, but even in absentia he’d made sure everything would be ready for the Fourth of July party. The housekeepers had cleaned every inch of every building. The pool and hot tub had been filled and chlorinated. The landscapers had trimmed every piece of greenery in the compound. The only thing missing had been him.

I threw myself into his arms as he got out of the car. “Hey, Anna,” he chuckled. “How you doing, kid?”

“What took you so long?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leading me to the house, his arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist. “I was hoping to be here before you guys arrived, but they were late refueling the plane in San Francisco, then we had to circle over Philly for a while, and on and on.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a sorry excuse.”

“I got news for you: that’s largely what adult life is—a series of sorry excuses.”

“Well, do better.”

“I fully intend to, fancy pants.”

I was seventeen, that age when precociousness morphs into arrogance, when you convince yourself that you’ve got the world all figured out, but you’re too frightened to actually deal with it. Uncle Mason had been my favorite—period—since I was twelve. That was when he moved back to Jersey, had the compound built, and based his business in Madsen.

The other kids had always been content to enjoy his property like it was an amusement park, but I liked talking to him. I could tell him about what was going on in school, and he’d teach me all the forbidden knowledge, everything beyond the purview of my textbooks. I could tell him the truth about what my friends and I had done this one night, even about boys, and he’d listen like a friend. And his two cents would be worth a million dollars, because he never wagged a finger or glared at me from under a furrowed brow. He’d take the time to understand where I was coming from. He’d remember when he was my age and share his own stories and never worry that I’d get the wrong idea. He’d always spoken to me like an equal. Even when he was talking about “adult life,” it was never with the stink of condescension. I got the sense that he hated it as much as I did, that he was giving me tips for how to handle it in the future, rather than drawing me a map and warning me not to deviate from the path lest I fall to my death.

He wasn’t like the rest of the family, and the rest of the family felt the same way. Mum-mum and my aunts were in the kitchen preparing the salad and sides for the barbecue. My mother had just joined them as Uncle Mason and I walked in.

“Hi, Mason,” she said. To call it perfunctory would be generous.

“How are you, Sue? Hey, Mom,” he said and kissed Mum-mum on the cheek.

“Oh,” my grandmother said, “so he’s here finally. Only two hours late.”

“I was thinking of you the whole time,” was Uncle Mason’s reply.

My mother pointed to me, and asked him, “Did she tell you she made honor roll?”

“No, she didn’t,” he answered, beaming.

“I always make honor roll,” I reminded my mother.

Her smile withered, and she gave me a look that contained the sum total of five hundred fights. She turned to Uncle Mason. “Listen,” she said, “I need to talk to you,” and raised her eyebrows in conspiracy.

I translated, “She wants to talk about the divorce.”

“Anna!”

“Am I wrong?”

“It’s a separation.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay,” Uncle Mason said, “Let’s talk.”

My mother looked at him like he’d just farted at the dinner table. “Well, go say hi to everybody first. I still have to get all this ready.”

Uncle Mason turned to me. “Hang with me.”

He greeted the rest of the women in the kitchen with kisses, ignoring the begrudging politeness with which they barely lifted their heads. He exited the main house to the patio, and I followed as he made his circuit. He greeted the elder statesmen of the clan, Uncle Pete and Uncle Francis and the like, in their seats on the patio. He shook their hands and asked how each of them was doing. They regaled him with tales of their most recent stress tests and how much fluid was pulled out of their knees, but they never bothered to ask about him. Some of the younger kids en route to another side of the pool ran past him. He greeted each of them by name, sometimes to no answer at all. He greeted the family matrons at their table in the shade by the pool. They all complained about how much worse their husbands were getting. “We’re going to have to take the keys from your uncle soon. The man can’t drive anymore.” “Do you know anyone at Saint Drausnius? Because Dr. Acampora wants to put your uncle on Coumadin, and I don’t think he needs it.” Then there was, “Barb, my hairdresser, her daughter’s recently a widow. You should meet her.”

That last one triggered Aunt Ginny. “What happened to Melissa?”

Aunt Theresa turned to her older sister. “Ginny, Melissa broke up with him years ago. Remember? We all thought she was the one…”

The other old women joined in, oblivious to Uncle Mason’s continued presence. The smile never left his face. If anything he accentuated it. Once they’d finished telling him to meet someone and give his mother some more grandchildren, as if she didn’t have enough, Uncle Mason moved on to the men of his generation gathered around the grill on the far side of the pool. They shook his hands, all smiles, but it only took a few minutes before they were needling him about politics.

“So, did the tax cut do anything for you, or do you still hate Trump?”

Uncle Mason said, “Well, I’d have preferred it if that money had gone to rebuilding dams or fixing bridges, so me and a few others are starting an NPO f for infrastructure improvement.”

I don’t think they heard him at all. They just kept going, not even insulting him but insulting Obama and Democrats in general and socialists, which I guess is what all Democrats are to them. I was a little surprised the n-word didn’t pop up. And Uncle Mason just stood there, taking it, never rising to challenge them, the smile never leaving his face.

I said, “Yeah, God forbid someone with money not hoard it all for themselves.”

My Uncle Rick said, “Excuse me, little girl, you’re speaking to adults.”

“And you’re insulting the man who invited you into his home. Who are you to lecture anybody?”

Before Uncle Rick could reply, Uncle Mason put his arm around me, turned me, and started escorting me away. “Anna, honey,” he said, “I got this. Thank you, but I got this.”

“They’re rude,” I spit.

“I know, but listen. I’m going to finish saying hi to everyone, then I have to talk to your mother. I’ll find you.”

I accepted the dismissal and wandered off. All I did for the next hour or so was wander. The little kids were all in the pool, playing games or trying to top one another with increasingly precipitous jumps off the high-dive. The girls who were all slightly younger than me were tooling around the three-hole golf course behind the house in motorized carts, practicing for the days they would get their licenses, getting a little taste of imaginary liberty. My younger brother, Felix, was with the other boys on the tennis court, using the net and surrounding cage for whatever asinine competition twelve-year old boys engage in, until one either breaks something or hurts himself, and a parent has to stomp over and put an end to it. I couldn’t find any of my older cousins, likely because they were hiding where they could imbibe one controlled substance or another with impunity.

I ended up leaning against a tree in the rolling pasture of Uncle Mason’s front yard. If there’d been rocks, I’d have kicked them. To my left Uncle Pete and some of the other older men were playing bacci. To my right some of my older cousins and younger uncles were playing bag toss. I could hear the kids in the pool playing. Everything around me was intact and functional, and I kicked a pinecone across the grass.

I don’t know how long I was there before Uncle Mason showed up. “Now,” he said, leaning against my tree, “where were we?”

“What’d my mother want? Money?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The divorce.”

Uncle Mason paused, then asked, “What have your mother and father told you?”

“Exactly what parents are supposed to: it’s not your fault, we still love you, all that.”

“Do you not believe them?”

“I believe them, but don’t bullshit me. They keep calling it a separation, but when mom has to step out of the room every time a lawyer calls, what am I supposed to think?”

“Why do you think your mother would need money?”

“ ‘Cause Dad makes more than she does, so he can hire better lawyers.”

“Do you miss your dad?”

“I see him and talk to him.”

“But he’s not in the house anymore.”

“That’s on her. He wanted to work things out. She didn’t.”

“Well, Anna, things haven’t been right between your parents for a while.”

“Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It was always her voice I heard screaming when I was in my room. They would wait until Felix and I were supposed to be asleep, and then they’d talk, and she’d end up screaming. I never heard him raise his voice.”

He flashed me a lopsided smile and asked, “Did you ever open your door? Listen from the top of the stairs?”

I gave him a shit-eaten grin of my own.

“Yeah,” he said, “when my parents would fight, I would sometimes eavesdrop. After a while I realized I was hearing things I didn’t want to hear. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize your parents are as clueless as everyone else.”

We walked across the yard for a time, silent. I was grateful that he didn’t tell me that I would understand one day, long after that moment, when it would be of no use to me.

Uncle Mason said, “But tell me about the fun stuff. What about you and your friends? What are you guys excited about now?”

“Right now I’m not talking to them. Dakota… okay, right now Dakota is probably shacking up with her track coach.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s really happening. She admitted it to me and Janelle. And Janelle is thinking about sneaking down to Baltimore to meet this guy she started talking to online.”

“That’s not smart.”

“That’s what I told them. Both of them. I told Dakota she’s being statutory raped by Mr. Harlington, and Janelle could end up dead. She doesn’t know this guy. She doesn’t even know if he’s really the guy in the picture he sent her.”

“And they’re pissed at you for not supporting them.”

“I don’t know what they’re pissed at. Like, I’m their friend, and I’m just supposed to tell them to do whatever they want, even if they get hurt? No. That’s not a real friend.”

“Well, you’re right about that. Thing is, Anna, most people don’t want real friends.”

“If I was going to do something stupid, I’d want them to tell me not to.”

“But you wouldn’t think it was stupid.”

I couldn’t find a counterpoint to that, so we ambled over to the edge of the lawn in quiet. We walked along the fence of pines that ran the boundary of the compound.

“What about school?” Uncle Mason asked. “How are your grades?”

“I’m honor roll. Maybe you haven’t heard.”

He chuckled. “What’s your favorite subject?”

“I love English. My teacher last year, Mr. Lench, he’s great. Like, I get Shakespeare now. I swear to God. Like not every word obviously, but we read Macbeth, and he taught us to not be intimidated by the poetry and just get that these are people with very understandable desires and fears. It’s awesome.”

“Fantastic. You really should see Shakespeare live. The text itself is great, but there’s no comparison to seeing actors performing it. I’ll take you next time there’s a good staging.”

“That would be amazing.”

Uncle Mason nodded. “What else?”

“I like History too, but my teacher’s…”

“What?”

“No, it’s just my teacher last year. She was—okay so, she’s teaching us about the French Revolution, but she’s giving a way-too simplistic version of why it happened. Like, her origin is kind of like a Marxist reading of it, but it’s not even that close. It was just the first two estates versus the third. She doesn’t take the liberal nobles into account. She doesn’t consider that poor parish priests were all for reform. She completely skipped over how important the wars were.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Without the wars the French Revolution goes in a different direction. There’s no Reign of Terror.”

Uncle Mason asked, “Where’d you learn about the French Revolution?”

“I listen to history podcasts.”

“I thought podcasts were just comedians talking to each other.”

“They have podcasts about everything now. Search a topic and you’ll find a podcast on it.”

“Huh. So, how did you respond to her erroneous version of history?”

“First, she said I was wrong because that wasn’t what she was teaching. Then, I got detention for telling her she was teaching lies.”

“Oh, Anna, don’t ever tell a teacher they’re wrong. And don’t ever prove it in public.”

“Why?”

“People have gone to war rather than admit they were wrong. You tell someone in a position of power that they’re wrong, especially in public where they can be humiliated, all they hear is someone challenging their authority. From that point forward you’ve got a target on your back.”

“Yeah, Ms. Miklos hated me after that.”

“See?”

“Then she shouldn’t be a teacher.”

“If we only listened to people without flaws of their own, no one would listen to anybody.”

“So what, I should listen to Uncle Rick and Co. when they start shitting on Democrats?”

“Don’t conflate listening with obedience. You listen to your opponent so you can learn who they are, where they’re coming from, what they want, what they’re afraid of. You learn everything you can about your enemy, then you use that knowledge against them.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime white nationalists get to scream hatred and run over peaceful protesters because they elected rich versions of themselves.”

“ ‘You say you want a revolution?’ ”

I was barely able to spit the words out. “I-I feel sometimes like this country needs one.”

“We line the villains up against a wall, right? But then we’re no better than they are.”

“You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”

Uncle Mason chuckled again. “Kid,” he said, “you know what rhetoric is?”

“It’s like spoken propaganda, right?”

“Rhetoric is persuasive language. That’s all. From the beginning, going all the way back to ancient Athens, it was all about persuading people to do what you wanted them to do and feel how you wanted them to feel. And even in the ancient world, long before psychology was a field of science, smart people recognized that human beings were governed by emotion much more than they were intellect. The Greeks and the Romans both recognized that rhetoric had nothing to do with presenting facts and parsing through evidence. Word usage, inflection, body language were all much more important. Rhetoric isn’t about intellectual arguments. It’s about emotional manipulation, and there’s no greater motivating emotion than fear. I’ve listened to every word you’ve said, and when you said, ‘You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance,’ you told me that you were so scared, you were prepared to deny another human being their humanity. That you can rationalize behavior you find revolting and hateful in other people when it’s for the greater good. And I think you already know that every holocaust and mass killing and act of terrorism, all the darkest acts in history were committed for the greater good.”

I scrunched my face into a knot of adolescent sulk, as if someone had spit my own bile into my mouth.

And as if on cue, Uncle Mason said, “And right now you’re angry because I just said you were wrong.” He looked at me with a smile. “Right?”

I looked up at Uncle Mason, confounded that a man so cultured and enlightened could be unfazed in the face of doom. “It’s scary,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure it is,” he said. “You know it’s all fucked up, but you don’t know what you can do about it. That’s scary. And that’s why you listen to the other side. Sun Tzu—know your enemy. Knowledge is power, and the more you know, the less helpless you are.”

We’d rounded the front yard and reached the driveway. I didn’t want to go back, be around everyone, hear all the celebratory self-obsession. No words, well intended as they were, were going to turn the world upside-down.

Uncle Mason saw it. “I have an idea,” he said. “If you’d like to learn something that could prove useful, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you during the fireworks. I’m correct in assuming you don’t care if you miss them?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Okay, but there are two conditions. One, this is our secret. You don’t tell anyone. Not even that I’m going to show you something during the fireworks. No one knows anything about this. Not your mom, not your friends. You tell no one. Agreed?”

“Not a word.”

“Two, this is a lesson. I want you to learn from this experience. This is not going to be about thrills and spectacle. You are going to learn. Do you understand me?”

“Okay.”

He nodded and smiled. “I’ll come get you just before the fireworks start.” A little conspiracy for two.

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 4 - The End)

The Goddess, the Artist, and the boxed-up statue sat in heightened chairs around a table in the back of the bar. Amidst the din of inebriated trivialities the two women nursed their drinks, Nella a vodka-cranberry, Ieajaita a beer.

“I think there’s something to the idea of the Muse,” said Nella. “You know? I mean, like, the actual Muses from Greek mythology.”

Ieajaita smiled. “Do you?”

“Well, look at it this way: the idea of art being a fundamental part of a human being basically exists in every pagan religion. Greco-Roman obviously. And in Hinduism you have the Apsaras.”

“The twenty-six dancers of Indra’s court, /” said Ieajaita, “each the embodiment of a different art.”

Nella nodded, her face pained. “In the Vana Parva they’re supposed to seduce virtuous men.”

“The Vana Parva does not say ‘men.’ / It states, ‘persons practicing rigid austerities.’ ”

“Yeah,” Nella smirked, “but we know what that means.”

Ieajaita leaned forward. “Saraswati, / goddess of art and wisdom, / is essential to Brahma’s mechanism / of cyclical creation.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that every civilization that ever lasted was a patriarchy. The matriarchies get wiped out.”

“Does that disqualify / our necessity?”

Nella scoffed. “You should ask my father that.”

Ieajaita leaned back. “The man does not approve of your vocation.”

“He doesn’t approve of taking on student loan debt for me to go be an artist.”

“And for what occupation / has your father / agreed to indebt himself?”

“Physical therapy. His least objectionable idea.”

Ieajaita nodded and allowed a moment of silent thought to pass. She said, “My father too derided My calling. / He considered it a travesty, tantamount to sin.”

“What d’you do?”

“My job, dear girl, / as meant to be.”

Ieajaita’s smile washed the scars on Nella’s heart. The Artist opened her mouth to speak, but she swallowed every word that pricked her tongue. She closed her mouth and looked away.

“You remind me of a boy,” said Ieajaita. “I knew long ago. / A tad younger than you are now, / his talent was unparalleled, / his passion without peer. / But sadly he practiced his Art among / ignorant men who balked at his proclivities. / His medium was the human heart / in all its splendor and buffoonery, / and he deployed his Art in aid / of his father and his kin. / But in this boy’s time and place / the Art was the realm of the feminine. / For the masculine to practice was / to invite a sentence of death.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“And yet the boy persisted, / for to not embrace The Promise / that resided in his heart / would have incurred a far worse fate.”

“Did they kill him?”

“Would have, were it not / for the women of his ilk, /” said Ieajaita. “They claimed the boy as one of their own. / An adept with a wand, / and so natural a weaver, / they could not in conscience geld / an ergi of such potency. / They fed him henbane twice, / ensconced him in their twine, / and once unwound, their cocoon / revealed him in her distaff glory.”

Nella sat, mouth ajar, lost in a dense tangle of the story’s fantastical shadows and the illumination beaming through the wood above.

Ieajaita’s eyes invited belief, insisted on it. “The Art unveils Truth, / even to those who live by the bridle, / and Truth is a River that nourishes all.”

Nella swallowed. “They remade him.”

“Through The Art.”

Nella met Ieajaita’s gaze. “You make art sound magical.”

“Only, my girl, / because it is.”

“I feel like I’ve heard the story before.”

Ieajaita leaned toward Nella. “It may never before have graced your ears, / but know you Truth—assuaged are your fears.”

“I just realized You never told me Your name.”

“Must you hear a symbol / to know of what it speaks?”

Nella’s breaths grew fast and loud. Ieajaita placed Her hand on Nella’s, and the boisterous surroundings vanished. There was only Ieajaita and Nella, everything else erased by consequence.

Nella whispered, “I knew. Somehow I knew.”

Ieajaita near-chanted, “The spirit coursing through your tender hands / was born in water flowing recherché. / You know the number not who beg and pray / to swim, consigned to trudge across the sand. / Possess you talent foreign to the mind / but well acquainted with the well-sprung blood. / It Speaks to Me in torrents, as a flood / baptizes Truths that only you will find. / But you must grasp your due, invoke your touch / of whimsy and your gloom to turn a stone / expunged into illuminated psalm. / And lift your head you must to do as much. / The fearless Artist never is alone, / for only she will God sit in her palm.”

Nella braced herself for the sky to open and speak to her. “What do I need to do?”

“Only relent, /” said Ieajaita. “But be warned: / you will never be the same.”

“I don’t want to be.”

Ieajaita nodded. She tossed two twenties onto the table, picked up her boxed statue by the string, and motioned for Nella to follow her.

They exited the bar, turned down an alley, then turned down another. Ieajaita and Nella faced one another in a sliver of shrouded space between two buildings, on an single plane choking on the lightlessness. Their faces stood inches apart.

Ieajaita took Nella’s hands. “I love Artists, /” She intoned. “They are My people. / I only regret / that I cannot do more.”

Nella’s lip quivered. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”

Ieajaita barely nodded as a tear welled. She removed the glove from Her right hand. The alley bloomed white, as Ieajaita placed Her hand over Nella’s eyes.

The bus screamed to a stop at the corner. Ieajaita and Nella stepped off and started down the street, Ieajaita holding the woman’s hand, leading her, while Her other hand held the statue in its box. Nella’s eyes floated in syrup, lost in sweetened magnificence. She was jetsam on The Endless River.

Ieajaita turned to her as they neared 433 Mellon. “It won’t be long, / my dear girl.”

Nella didn’t hear a word.

Ieajaita took her by the shoulders as they neared the porch. “There are steps before you. /” She said. “Raise high your roof beam, carpenter.”

Nella’s head stared across the water, blind to the material world, as she lifted her feet and ascended the stairs.

Ieajaita swung open the front door and walked Nella through. She closed it, then led the young woman through Her bedroom, to the door to the basement. She turned Nella toward Her, grasped the sides of her head, and aimed her eyes at Her own. “Nella, my dear, you are almost there. / You need only make a brief descent. / Keep in mind the lyre of Orpheus, / and follow the music down your path.”

Nella, feeble-minded, smiled.

Ieajaita bowed Her head. She opened the door to the basement, and turned Nella around. “Go, dear child.”

Nella started down the staircase.

Ieajaita closed the door and headed back through Her bedroom. She went up to the second floor and opened the door at the top of the stairs. She walked into the bedroom, unoccupied save for dozens of pieces entombed in wooden boxes and paper wrappings. Ieajaita placed Nella’s statue amongst the other boxes. Let your discovery augur your greatness, She prayed, then closed the door as She left the room.

She returned to the basement. She heard Her friends feeding beneath the stairs before She’d fully descended. She walked to the opposite wall and slumped to the floor, ignoring the stains on the ground.

She stared into the black beneath the staircase, saw the shadow-cloaked churnings of the Charchilla and Aberras as the moist sounds of slaughter drooled across the room. She spun her mind back to paintings and etchings and sculptures She’d once granted credence, long lost works whose Creators’ names have been exiled to anonymity. She remembered their imaginings, representations of the horrors that were Her friends. Ground littered with mortal remains, survivors fleeing with mouths open in terror, nightmares drawn into the waking world. Try as She did, She saw none of that beneath the stairs.

When the sound of crunching bone came to a halt and blood ceased to drip onto the floor, the Charchilla and Aberras padded out from beneath the staircase, into the dying halogen of the basement. Ieajaita waved them over. They curled up beside Her, the Charchilla on Her left and Aberras on her right. Ieajaita stroked Aberras’ exposed spine. A tumor popped and flecked Her cheek, and Ieajaita pet the Charchilla’s open wound.

“Medication fades apace, /” she said, “faster than a friendly face.” A tear escaped Her eye. “Await the day that I may die / on the sword that’s my own lie.”

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 3)

Ieajaita followed the macadam to a massive six-tiered nautilus, three floors above ground and three below. Albright’s Gallery hosted the work of the city’s aspiring painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The curators required no fees for admittance and took no commissions from sales. Madsen’s visual Artists, aspiring and otherwise, could exhibit their work to any and all interested.

Those interested were in short supply. The spectators pacing through the gallery talked among themselves about everything but the work before them. They choked on the scandals spilling out of the news cycle, standing on the shoulders of far-off calumnies. They traded judgments on their friends and neighbors, trading in gossip from the peak of an upturned nose. They dwelt on their dinner plans with the rigor of a physicist attempting to pick a lock on the cosmos. Flipping through television channels only half-paying attention.

Ieajaita could relate. She ascended the escalating spiral and let Her eyes listen to the walls. She looked upon paintings in oil and watercolors, illustrations in pencil, ink, and charcoal, sculptures in clay and stone, photographs, in both black-and-white and color, printed on paper and glass. She passed one photograph: black-and-white, high contrast, deep focal length, digital. It was a view of a building, some wide-assed edifice squatting somewhere in the city. Long, straight shadows sliced across the bone-white face of the building. Pure formalism.

Ieajaita could have run Her hand over any piece and not once come away with fingers coated in the fine, vestigial dust of Inspiration. There was merit to be found in that gallery, but nothing Spoke, not to Her or any others. The Artists had dipped their toes in Her realm, but they longed only for applause. A panoply of indifference, visions for the blind.

She circled the gallery’s uppermost tier and started Her descent, when ahead and out of view sounded a foghorn of a voice, strident and fearful. “Obviously the cup is vaginal. You’re all familiar with that symbolism. But note the scythe protruding out of the cup like a straw.”

Ieajaita followed the voice to an emaciated woman standing before and indicating the highlights of a collage. The composition was pure classical, right down to the geometric equations. It was a depiction of a view with which She was all too familiar: Nargory restored and Her Divine Queen resurrected. But it was no invocation. This was a hologram, a fractal Frankenstein’s monster. Each item had been drawn in moue-faced pixels, then shrunken like a head, copied, printed, cut out, and pasted together with its clones. Pinocchio pieced together from Geppetto’s homunculi.

“Lyuemper,” the collagist said, “is the only goddess in mythology to hold a scythe. Every other scythe-bearer, including the grim reaper, is unmistakably male. And reaping the harvest was a male’s job. But here’s Lyuemper of the Vanfiri carrying a very large and emasculating blade.

“If you go through all the old Vanfiri myths, the Uros-and-Lyuemper stories all follow the same formula: Uros does something Lyuemper doesn’t like, she calls him on it, he begrudges her wisdom. So Uros is only the petty, angry father figure because of his wife’s ceaseless hectoring. And she’s the philanderer, not him. Lyuemper is the Ur-embodiment of the female threat, and every misogynistic depiction in religion and folklore can be traced back to her.”

Ieajaita turned, swallowing Her fury, the taste of rust settling on Her tongue, and started down the spiraling gallery. One of the great virtues of Art was what the audience brought to it, She knew, the downside being that some saw blue and called it red. Had the truculent dilettante been looking for something other than the indignities she’d suffered, she might not have come to such a pig-ignorant fucking misunderstanding.

Ieajaita knew the truth. She had been there. Lyuemper had been The Great Mother. Man had needed Her advocacy to counterbalance Uros-on-High’s judgment. Discipline tempered by love. And Her infidelity: to whom was She to have shown fidelity? To Uros, King of All Gods? How could She not have remained faithful to the omnipresent and irresistible? Would metal spurn a magnet, or the earth its moon? Lyuemper’s fidelity had been to man, all of man, and She had remained faithful to The End. She had given Life, and it was not The Great Mother’s failing if cowardly bottom-feeders didn’t know how great a gift Life was. The Goddess of The Arts knew, and, like all Gods, She knew the alternative.

Ieajaita neared surface level when She felt the sudden gravity of henbane. She stopped. Someone was Speaking, the voice a thread woven through the air. Ieajaita followed it down the sloping floor. Every piece She passed stood mute. The other visitors pantomimed their inattention, Her every sense committed entirely to the Creation’s voice. At first she’d heard only a vague, intimated immediacy, but as the lure grew, as she neared the gallery’s depths, the taste of rust was consumed by mandrake. Black swallowed the winding corridor, leaving only a white glow that ballooned as She neared. What was it?

It was Her. A statue of The Goddess of The Art. Two-and-a-half feet tall, carved of cedar. The gouges were imprecise, sometimes violent. The posture was tired. Accented with hairs of watercolor, the paint seemed to be fading before Her eyes. A far cry from antiquity’s polish.

But that distance heralded Truth. This was not a depiction of traditional beauty in gleaming stone, of genuflection before a now-extinct glory. This was not the Ieajaita Who had traversed the cities of a civilization unknown even to legend, Who had sat before supplicants and graciously accepted their lionization, Who had with only a wave of Her hand blessed the Artist with the power to realize his or her most honest visions. This was a depiction that had never before been Created. It was Ieajaita as She was now.

The statue was Speaking to Her, Her own voice crying out in a nonsense meter. How? Ieajaita’s knees weakened and Her head bobbed in champagne. The surrounding blackness, already total, grew even darker, and the bursting white of the statue filled Her eyes with tiny pulsars that throbbed a rhythm conceived in strangeness. Ieajaita closed Her eyes.

“Do you like it?”

The young woman stood like a camphor bowed by storm. Her pale eyes, swimming in starlight, shrank into her skull. She was an entire world’s feelings embarrassed to a single point.

Ieajaita collected Herself. “I do, /” she said. “Very much indeed.”

“Thank you,” she said, then stood mute for moments, before she said, “Nella Davies. This is my piece.” She offered her hand like a rabbit peeking out its hole.

Ieajaita shook. “Very pleased to meet you, Nella, / and congratulations on an / exemplary piece of sculpture.”

Nella stage-whispered, “Thank you,” through a sheepish grin.

“I’m fond of your choice of degradable materials. / What prompted it?”

“Um…” she started, “well, I-I like working with a lot of different materials. You know, it all depends on what you want to do. And with this one I just hadn’t worked in wood for a while, so I grabbed a block of cocobola I had laying around, and… I just started carving without really thinking about it. And as it started to take shape, I just kinda felt like it should be in something that wouldn’t last. You know? Like, it’s more important that this sculpture is for right now and not, like, a hundred years in the future. You know? And that’s why I painted it in watercolor.”

“An astute choice, /” said Ieajaita. “And, may I say, / Your technique is remarkable, / Precise but passionate.”

Nella’s head drooped. “Thank you. I, uh, I actually think my technique is my weak spot. I was just kinda in the zone with this one.”

“All too apparent. / But tell me: / Why paint it?”

“Well, I figured since, like, all those statues from antiquity were painted, this one should be.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Just, like, as I was carving away at it, it just took on this female form that, I guess, it was… it felt like it was something that would’ve been made back then. You know? Like, even though it’s not marble and it’s not supposed to be anyone special, it just felt like… like it was this embodiment, this representation of something great but indefinable that we all have in common.”

Ieajaita smiled, nodding. She turned back to Herself. “Yes.”

Nella stood beside Her. “What do You feel when You look at it?”

Ieajaita gave Herself over to the statue and said, “I feel a kinship with unknown eyes, / a stranger’s voice that could be mine. / Everywhere I’ve never been / feels familiar. I’m one / link in a chain that / spans the breadth of / the entire / planet / earth.” Ieajaita turned to the sculptress.

The young woman beamed, her hair cast out of her face, her head high. “Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I want people to feel, that they’re not alone.”

“I would like to buy your statue. / How much will you take?”

“Serious? You seriously want to buy it?”

“I never announce / disingenuous intentions.”

“You really like it that much?”

“It may be the finest piece I’ve yet to see / In all my time in Albright’s Gallery.”

“Then I want you to have it. No charge.”

“Please, my child, / don’t be foolish.”

“If you like it that much, I want you to have it.”

Ieajaita stood between Nella and the statue. “Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors. / You offer your work without recompense / and pussyfoot in speech and posture. / You are an Artist, / and you must be the first to endorse your own legitimacy. / Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors.”

Nella felt the knife twist and lowered her head. “I know. You’re right.”

“Then raise your head / and demand your pittance.”

Nella inhaled, raised her head, and said, “I’d ask 500 for this, but I’m not going to. I don’t have any good explanation, but I don’t want to charge you. And just so you know, I have charged people before. I usually make money off my work. But I don’t want your money.” She pointed to the statue. “You get it, and people don’t usually get it. So let me thank you and give you the statue.”

Ieajaita examined her in silence, tilting Her head to a more advantageous angle. “Under the condition, /” She said, “that I may buy you a drink / and plumb your mind for greater attitudes / and loftier considerations.”

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.

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 1)

Never has nothing existed, for there has always been The Promise, and from The Promise issued The Vanfiri and The Tolteain. For incalculable ages the twin races of Deities worked in concert with one another, but had intelligent beings witnessed Their intimacies, they would have trembled before the mutual animosity. It was only a matter of time before the crucible that was The High War erupted, and when it did, The Vanfiri and The Tolteain made manifest every shred of destructive force at Their disposal, Each determined to destroy the Other. In time mankind chose its side, and the fortunes of war began to turn from The Tolteain. In a bout of desperation Elltennix, Tolteain Keeper of Secrets, opened the gates of His sepulcher and released to the world all knowledge hidden from mortal man. All the crimes he hid from his neighbor, every sin he had committed away from judging eyes, the unseen latticework of the natural world, the origins of this universe and all those that preceded it. Elltennix unleashed all His secrets, and a flood of madness subsumed mankind. Amidst the anarchy a crime was committed, a crime so unspeakable Uros-on-High has decreed it never be recounted. Its monstrous byproduct, an abhorrent violation of the laws of God and man, was the Charchilla. Of undefined and constantly changing shape, the Charchilla was a pulsating mass of interconnected tumors. One after another they would burst, producing a fountain of blood and pus, only to be replaced by a new tumor that would ripen in turn. Tufts of barbed cilia sprouted from its body, emitting a stench of sulfur and methane. It seeped across the ground on the muscular contractions of its undercarriage, secreting and sliding along a layer of feces. Upon the triumph of The Vanfiri over The Tolteain, Olemphia, Goddess of Cruelty, captured the Charchilla and consigned it to the island of Ioru, where it would trap and devour shipwrecked sailors and traders. An utterly loathsome creature, the Charchilla inspired hate and fear in all who encountered it.

Aberras was the first son and heir to Phyton, king of the mighty city-state of Dthalymci. Born and raised as scion to the greatest king of the True Golden Age, Aberras, heeding his father’s admonition that “a sharp mind will cut through steel,” developed his mind into the most powerful weapon in Dthalymci. Studying under both Bolbol and Sarmiche, he quickly surpassed his teachers in both wisdom and knowledge. Aberras grew proud. While in Morxos with his father, he engaged Lultaeil the Pedagogue in a public debate and won. Aberras’ pride grew. Upon asking for the hand of Euklepthea in marriage, her father, High Priest of the Cult of Uengru, challenged Aberras to pit his intellect against the Librarians of Kaalenmiir. If Aberras could confound just one of them, the High Priest would accede to the marriage. Aberras confounded them all. His pride grew further, as did his boredom. Aberras had come to believe there was no man alive who could teach him anything, but still he thirsted for all he did not know. So Aberras set out from his home, crossed The Skyward Bridge over The Endless River, and entered Nargory, home of The Vanfiri. There he implored Ruut, God of Knowledge, to teach him. Ruut told the man to return home, that Ultimate Knowledge was beyond the ken of mortal minds. But Aberras was prideful. In his anger he doubted the limitlessness of Ruut’s Knowledge, he challenged Him, and finally he cursed Him. Enraged, Ruut turned Aberras’ body backwards. His legs were now at his shoulders and his arms at his hips. His eyes now book-ended the small of his back, his nose had grown from his coccyx, and his lips ringed his anus. Ruut then turned Aberras inside-out, exposing his organs to the elements and condemning him to an eternity deprived of the blessed relief of his own mortality. Aberras was forced to roam the world, forever the embodiment of all that is wrong and should not be. Hence, it is from his name that we have derived the words “aberrant” and “aberration.” Recently it was also thought that the story of Aberras served as the inspiration for the expression “talking out of your ass,” but this has been proven erroneous.

Uros-on-High had grown concerned, for mankind, still a newborn in the cradle of The Gods, had developed the ability to Create. Man’s effrontery had begun in innocence, in fact purely by accident. Those few in command of The Art did not at first know what they were doing or how they were doing it. But through trial and error strong minds soon unearthed the fundamentals of Creation, and The Age of Sorcery began. This age was a brief one, for man had quickly learned much more than petty spells. Man had learned how to alter Existence to suit his desires—not only to Create but to Re-create. Creation was the province of only The Gods and The Promise, and mankind had grown from emulating Them to openly undoing Their Divine Work. Uros-on-High deemed it a blasphemy, judged that the world must be cleansed, that humanity must be destroyed. He opened His mouth and inhaled deeply, creating a great wind that swept across the whole earth. Humanity in its entirety was uprooted and sailed between the jaws of Uros-on-High, spending its last moments of Existence in the digestive tract of The Divine. But then Uros, King of All Gods, grew ill. A pain in His belly persisted and worsened until He was crippled in pain. He called for His Wife and Queen, Lyuemper, Goddess of Life, to give him succor. Lyuemper took up Her scythe, Paumnanox, swung, and sliced open Uros’ belly. Two soft, gleaming hands rose from the wound, parted Uros’ flesh, and Ieajaita emerged. A beautiful female of dove-white skin, with long flowing hair and eyes that could cast away Darkness, all of sorcery, all of mankind’s potential, had concentrated and assumed Divine Form. At first Uros-on-High wanted to kill Ieajaita, but Lyuemper warned Him off His murderous course. She reasoned that if mortals could develop the ability to Create as only The Gods and The Promise could, and the Gods had not taught them to do so, then only The Promise could have inculcated the ability in man. Therefore Ieajaita also was by The Will of The Promise. Lyuemper argued that The Promise clearly wanted man to command The Art. Who was He, Uros-on-High, to defy The Promise? The King of All Gods heeded His Wife’s wise words. He created a new humanity, and He named Ieajaita Goddess of The Art. It would be Her Divine Duty to guide, protect, and when necessary punish those mortals who practiced The Art.

The Charchilla limped across the basement floor, every inch an ooze of wet, impatient castigation. Aberras scuttered on all fours into the corner by the rust-choked water heater and shivered. Both beasts loosed a hungry, beset-upon moan.

The house sat on a shadow-draped street in of one of Madsen, New Jersey’s least auspicious boroughs. Long abandoned by even the most discerning of reprobates, Blue Orchard was an open scab making witness to its own decay, and 433 Mellon Street was ground zero for the desiccation.

Ieajaita slipped Her glowing hands into a pair of long, black gloves as the ululations of the two beasts reached Her ears. She let out a small, impatient breath. Every night the same thing, / They know I’m going out,/ They know they’ll eat,/ be it beef or fowl / or salmon, cod, or trout.

She crossed Her makeshift bedroom. She had done Her best to make the dilapidated living room habitable, at least enough for Her. Ieajaita had never gone in for the grandiloquent trappings favored by Her fellow Gods, columns and colonnades and the like. Prints of some of Her favorite paintings hung on the walls. A full bookshelf ran the lower perimeter of the room like a readable baseboard. Her feloniously powered computer was filled with Her favorite pieces of music. She had never warmed to cinema—too technological a medium for Her—but She would sometimes search the internet for videos of Her favorite bits of theater.

But none of it was the same. Artistic prints couldn’t compete with the originals. The few pieces She had ever bought from the Artist had invariable been stolen, and She held no sway with collectors and dealers. Recordings were pale echoes of a live performance. She couldn’t feed off them, commune with the musicians through the airy vibrations. And so much had been lost over time. Same with the plays, and as with poetry and prose, translation always left so much to be desired.

Ieajaita stooped to inspect Her hair in the mirror. She still liked it. Not yet time for a change. She slung Her purse over Her shoulder and started down the basement.

The Charchilla and Aberras perked up at the sight of Her and b-lined for the foot of the stairs, whimpering ravenous lamentations the whole way.

She bellowed as the monsters neared, ““Know you not the hour I make My egress? / Intellect nor memory is no stranger to you two / that lurch and prattle tears at Me, largesse / the only virtue that endears My hand to you.”

The Charchilla slunk back a step and trembled, its cilia waving with a stutter. Aberras bowed his head and looked up at Her from under a guilty brow.

“Look at My face,” She said, smoothing Her voice as She would’ve the comforter on Her bed. “Look in My eyes, / Do you not know Me by now? / Do you think I would really let you starve? / Is that something I would allow?”

The two walking nightmares perked up and shuffled closer to their Benefactor, the memory of Her anger already lost amid the scent of an impending meal wafting under their noses.

Ieajaita kneeled before them and smiled. “You fear too deeply / an impossible winter. / Sustenance will come.”

She remembered when She would reserve Haiku for the world outside Her refuge, when it was one of the few forms She could safely employ should She need to speak to a mortal. Thank Uros for free verse, She thought.

“Don’t think I’m oblivious / to what you two must endure, /” she said. “Cages are insidious, / I feel it too, I assure. / Were there to grow a forest / so dark no man would venture / into, there I’d let you rest / and end would your indenture. / Man, however, must own all, / Even that which he must hate / and cast upon it a thrawl. / Never would it, friends, abate. / No place is safe for you two / where Magic is for purchase, / for the world is but a zoo / all across its vile surface. /”

The two oddities shuddered at the mention of a zoo.

Ieajaita resumed Her chanso. “There are times I envy you. / While I pass, free of danger, / through the mortals’ cockeyed view, / Feel I more the stranger. / Please do not impede Me, friends. / Need you for My own defense.”

Aberras and the Charchilla looked at Her, an almost doe-eyed confusion turning their heads to one side like a dog’s. Ieajaita smiled at them, stood, and started up the steps to the first floor. Before She’d gotten to the front door, the duo’s tremulous wail filled the house. She slammed the door behind her.

IN MEMORIAM: PHILIP ROTH

I wrote this two days ago with the intention of keeping it in a drawer until the event of Philip Roth’s death. I wish I could’ve sat on it longer.

   It is May 21, 2018, and Philip Roth is still alive. I’ve just a watched a two-hour documentary on him. Produced by the BBC in 2014, it is to date Roth’s last interview. Four years hence that status is unlikely to change. He is now 85 years old. Having watched the man’s final public reconciliation with his work, I find myself, like many of the protagonists of his later novels, contemplating the impending mortality of a man who once engaged all facets of life, its most self-destructive zealotry, the revelries of the id, and the moribund wallows in between, through the caustic, insightful, crushing, and jubilant forge that was his typewriter. I’m unable to ignore the rapidly approaching inevitable, and I find myself inexplicably moved to commit to words my feelings about America’s bravest writer. 

   Maybe it’s not so inexplicable. I’m probably moved to write about my appreciation for Philip Roth for the same reason I was compelled to write about a Roman emperor with self-esteem issues. The thoughts and feelings that plague are incidental. The force that galvanizes me, that keeps my fingers repeatedly punching the keys in front of me, is as irresistibly elemental as gravity. It’s an incomprehensible drive as intoxicating, liberating, and empowering as it is frustrating, confounding, and mercurial. A good day’s writing will take you higher than the Amazon’s most potent psychotropic fungus with Sly Stone grooving through your head. A bad day will send you into an apoplexy of self-excoriation that would make a Catholic flagellant wince. You sit alone in a room, creating human beings and the worlds they inhabit, indulging the most deeply shrouded recesses of your imagination. It’s a task you can only accomplish through agonizing introspection, facing the fibers of your being that terrify and disgust you and refusing to shrink or flee. You are god staring into the abyss, and when the abyss stares into you, you record what it sees. Philip Roth has known this irresistible force with an intimacy to which I can only aspire.

   The name Philip Roth first crossed my path when I was in my late twenties. At the time I worked for a production company in Bala Cynwyd, in a small office building on City Avenue. Creativity was paramount to the owner, and he’d taken pains that the office space reflect that, so much so that in the lounge area he had erected two bookcases, each blanketing an entire wall, and filled it with a large portion from his own collection. He encouraged me to avail myself of the office library, and I did not hesitate. It was from that collection that I first read Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The owner even gave me to keep his copy of Flannery O’Connor’s complete stories.

    There, on the shelves, I found Portnoy’s Complaint. Beyond the summary on the jacket I knew nothing about it. I will never forget sitting on the steps outside that office building, with my cigarettes and iced tea, and ploughing through this ribald mating call to the self, this uproarious sucker-punch of a tug of war between guilt and pleasure. I loved that I had found a writer who was as creative and florid a wordsmith as he was genuinely funny. Portnoy’s Complaint is the funniest book I have ever read. “Funnier than Catch-22, Tony?” Much funnier. Even the one-liners rank with any comedian’s best: “I put the id in Yid, she put the oy in goy.” I wonder what Roth would think of the image of me, sitting outside this office building, laughing out loud while mere feet away three aspiring masters of the universe clad in expensive suits and no senses of humor stared at me past upturned noses, the notion of literature being funny as alien to them as selflessness and empathy.

   There was no turning back for me. I was going to read every word Philip Roth had ever published and do my damnedest to get my hands on the ones he hadn’t, and the more I read, the thicker the spell he had cast around me grew. His prose was a once-in-a-lifetime excavation. It was intelligent but never jumped about and waved its arms, drawing attention to itself. It was calculated and carefully realized but supple and inviting. This was literature that had been raised from the cold, unfeeling mausoleum where serious writers write oh-so seriously and elicit no human emotion so much as boredom. This literature was alive, Frankenstein’s monster post-lightning, Miles Davis plugging in and turning up the volume:

   The Devil of the Little Place—the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies. No, the provincial poisons do not help. People are bored here, they are envious, their life is as it is and as it will be, and so, without seriously questioning the story, they repeat it—on the phone, in the street, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. They repeat it at home to their husbands and wives. It isn’t just that because of the accident there isn’t time to prove it’s a ridiculous lie—if it weren’t for the accident she wouldn’t have been able to tell the lie in the first place. But his death is her good fortune. His death is her salvation. Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of the them all, which is death.

--The Human Stain, 1998

    And the more I read of Philip Roth, the more I came to recognize him to be America’s bravest writer. Yes, he was politically brave. He pilloried Nixon at the height of his untouchability with Our Gang. With The Human Stain he savaged America’s judgmental hypocrisy over Bill Clinton (and maybe took a swipe at all the self-serving, finger-wagging charges of misogyny directed at him over the years). And Roth received the best reviews of his life for his politically charged novels of the Nineties and early Aughts. But it’s easy to congratulate someone for taking a stand against outside aggression and obvious injustice, and if that was all Roth had done, he would be as shallow as the writers and critics who sang he praises for being as shallow and cowardly as they. But Roth did, and has always done more, been braver, than that. After holding up a mirror to the world at large, he turns the mirror on himself, walking Henrik Ibsen’s poetical talk: “To live is to battle with trolls / in the vaults of heart and mind. / To write: that is to sit / in judgment over one’s self.”

    Nathan Zuckerman is the most obvious mirror Roth holds before himself. In The Counterlife Zuckerman does what we have all done: imagines what might have been. He imagines a reality in which his brother, the Zuckerman who did not reject the life of the good Jewish son, tried to do so in a fit of middle-aged pique? Where does that lead him? Where does that leave Nathan? What are his options, which choices does he make, and how does the alternate history, the counterlife, compare to the reality? He does not like what he sees. Nathan Zuckerman (or is it Philip Roth?) has failed to understand and empathize, to accept and condone, to not pressgang those he loves into the roles he needs them to play in his story. He only manages to put himself into their shoes by fictionally killing himself. Only then is he able to feel their hurt and anger at him. The novel is as much a Molotov cocktail of self-examination as it is pelvic thrust of narrative whimsy.

   Then there’s Mickey Sabbath, the gloriously, obscenely lecherous anti-hero of Sabbath’s Theater, a man religiously committed to antagonizing the world via hedonism and intransigent in his refusal to examine his urges. Picture the following scene: you, with no money, no income, and a reputation you have willfully flushed down the toilet, have just been kicked out of your house by your wife, who has finally had enough of your bullshit. You bump into a dear, old friend, and though you have failed to reach out to him for decades, he nevertheless invites you into his home. Within forty-eight hours you masturbating into his college-aged daughter’s underwear and trying to talk his wife into sleeping with you:

   Of the second night that Sabbath spent in Debby’s room, suffice it to say—before moving on to the crisis of the morning—that his thoughts were of both mother and daughter, singly and together. He was under the spell of the tempter who task it is to pump the hormone preposterone into the male bloodstream.

   In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby’s tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet… He bequeathed unto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm. The robust road again! I have a mistress! He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe. In the masterpieces they’re always killing themselves when they commit an adultery. He wanted to kill himself when he couldn’t.

--Sabbath’s Theater, 1995

   I would be surprised if Philip Roth actually leads, or even at one time led, a life comparably libertine to Mickey Sabbath’s. But what a fitting allegory for the writer’s life, that most selfish of vocations, a calling that demands the ceaseless dramatization of your hopes and desires and doubts and neuroses coupled with the expectation that total strangers not only enjoy being made privy to them but pay you for the privilege. I have no doubt that Philip Roth harbors enough guilt to fuel the fear that, like Mickey Sabbath, he will die alone, unloved, and in constant pain.

   It’s dangerous for the audience to conflate the art with the artist. One is immortal and perfect, filling some ethereal void too deep within us to identify. The other is mortal, all too human, and just as profoundly fallible as the rest of us. Remember: Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski. Loving the art will never disappoint you, but artists are people, and people always disappoint. But over a career that has spanned six decades Philip Roth has disappointed less than one would expect to hold up under scrutiny. And yet he does, because of his unwavering commitment to the perpetuation of frighteningly honest literature that speaks from one to all. We will always have Philip Roth’s work, but we will not have the man for much longer. Let’s try and appreciate this extremely valuable and brave man while we still have him. 

“The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.”

--Philip Roth