[MIA with flu this week, and somehow this flu and I have got to move to a new apartment this weekend. ugh, so stressed! i may be scarce until the weekend is out, but you know how to reach me in the meanwhile. thanks for patience!]
The sky has opened up a torrent, and the mad-scrawled black line of an alchemist is inside a phone booth streaked with rain, like a powerline fallen, spitting electric charge.
"Hello?" Says Naomi Weiss.
She can hear the rush of rain, the sound of car horns, and the distant noise of a siren, as if --
"There's been an accident," a hoarse voice she'll never, ever forget tells her, and even now her chest tightens, her body is called, and she feels something like an old stir at the urgency in his voice, something horrible is happening and it's her he's telling, her he needs --
"I need to know I didn't dream it," he tells her disjointedly.
"Aden, where are you?" Ten years, more than ten years of counseling, of healing, and all she needs to hear is him soft like that, hurt, maybe, and Naomi is already moving about her small apartment, seeking her shoes, rain poncho, umbrella --
"I'm -- off of it," he tells her, and she thinks he means the laudanum she hates so much and not the Path and so she says, "okay, okay -- I know. Just tell me where you are."
"Where is she?" He asks her, urgently.
"Who?" Naomi asks, freezes where she is, her house key falling from her hand.
"My girl," he says. "Wasn't she mine? Where is she now?"
"Aden --" It's like a hand has suddenly grabbed her throat all over again, a snake's tail in her gut ice-cold, hollow fangs in her spine and she hates it all again, hates how she can't move --
"Where's her stone?"
Naomi hangs up, suddenly, mortified rush, shaking herself to nausea, because she can't get them out of her head -- the sound of the rain, the sound of the sirens, just like that night.
obliterate the memory of coming to at dawn
knowing only that the night was someplace that you had gone
and the amber waves on the showboat of laughter
and you cannot change the way you slid down railings in the lobby
and then again down the gangway shortly after
obliterate the memory of coming to at dawn
knowing only that the night has gone
obliterate the grass stains from the cloth
you were only in the grassy fields to pick a hollyhock
you want to stick it to the stem again
by fusing up the atoms and then believe that it will live again
just from the power of your refusing to believe it cannot happen
obliterate the memory of coming to at dawn
knowing only that the night has gone
I haven't even discussed this party with Milla nor the role I expect her to play, but I went out to buy her a dress without her consultation and --
Did I dream I saw Phina in the street? Am I losing myself on this Path? Did I dose too much, is something fucking happening to me?
White. It was white, absence of a red little --
You'll catch your death, she said, and I don't remember what I said -- she knows it's too late, so all she said was It was good...
Good how? You goddamn child, you cruelty --
To see you, she said, Hell --
It seems like I can hear Mercie's voice in the crevices of something breaking like glass, and she says, what were you going to do, my Brother?
Nothing. Nothing. I imagined it. I imagined it. I imagined it. Nothing.
--
obliterate the cherry and the wild berry juices
that you trailed along the hallways of the whorehouse that you used
as a store room for your fox furs and the harvest from the orchard
full of hollyhocks and cherry trees and other flowery images
that you trailed along the hallways of the whorehouse that you used
as a store room for your fox furs and the harvest from the orchard
full of hollyhocks and cherry trees and other flowery images
of course you wanted everything cold
but when you opened up the door everything got old
i said of course you wanted everything cold
but when you opened up the door all the flower petals folded
obliterate your speech so you cannot ask forgiveness
for hanging with the vampires when there was no one to witness
the submission of the skin upon your neck
all They wanted was a dance
but when you opened up the door everything got old
i said of course you wanted everything cold
but when you opened up the door all the flower petals folded
obliterate your speech so you cannot ask forgiveness
for hanging with the vampires when there was no one to witness
the submission of the skin upon your neck
all They wanted was a dance
you gave your peace of mind instead
there is a tower with a winding set of stairs
you will descend into the absolute light
into the absoluteness of light
and come aware
and become aware
you will descend into the absolute light
into the absoluteness of light
and come aware
and become aware
[-- spanking-new sunset rubdown, 'coming to at dawn' (download, it's beauty)]
Milla is learning. Mother of God.
Then today, I came by Shannon's house like I said I would. The witch who cursed her isn't interested in letting go. In fact, had I to guess it, I'd say she wants to take Me on. It's pretty interesting, actually; We've never been called that name before, but I'm fairly sure it refers to Us.
I wonder if this is what the reversed Empress means in the spread. I had interpreted it as Lamia's dominant position on the tree following the Sun path -- I'd assumed by finding my that baby's body gravesite I could turn the card upright again. A reversed Major in the spread is never something to avoid addressing, I've learned. That was part of my amending things with Marius, with that "party invitation," of course. If he buys into my grand reformation (with Milla playing her part), and if he's drinking, I can ask him to call Naomi. He can tell her the family needs it. Ha.
But then, what is this creature? The gypsy women that taught me cards also taught me not to underestimate the old witches. Interesting, interesting.
I told Shannon to get out of the house (who's Cole again?). And when she did, I cut my hand and spilt my blood there. It was better than writing Our name. So she'll know how to find Us; so that We can tell her the things she thinks are hers are not, anymore.
--
back into those things you wish to undo
the crown for your tomb
not a day goes by or the nights for you
then dance in the rain
cause them towns all will miss your face
when we'll toast for the pain
then we'll taste of the halo of shame
and if you'll pass that number
waiting for the summer
so that you can not rest
curious perfection
its haunting life lessons
the crown for your tomb
not a day goes by or the nights for you
then dance in the rain
cause them towns all will miss your face
when we'll toast for the pain
then we'll taste of the halo of shame
and if you'll pass that number
waiting for the summer
so that you can not rest
curious perfection
its haunting life lessons
so that you cannot rest
[-- woods, 'the number' (download, it's spooky!)]
have we come 'round
have we come 'round again?
if you need a little song to help you move along
into the next
verse or two, or three
of course we'll come 'round
we always come round again
we'll go around, we'll come back 'round again
when you need a little song to help you move along
into the next
world or two, or three
--
Marius Vega almost doesn't answer when he sees it's his cousin Brande on the caller ID. He lets it ring nine times -- once for every baseless, manipulative purpose for which the man could possibly be calling; once for each uncomfortable silence they've endured as blood bretheren, once for every poison tincture the black sheep has injected into the family tree.
Once for every horrible fate he can imagine befalling the damned alchemist at that moment, nine crises that could be averted if only he, the patriarch, would answer the phone. And the phone can't ring enough times to quantify the number of sleepless nights he'd endure in that case, and so it's this and no other reason that prompts him finally to pick up.
Aden Brande had been prepared to wait, and so it's with no particular urgency he's speaking: "Remember I asked you about that Bennett Estate?"
"You upset my mother, Brande," is all Marius says, and of course cousin knows what he's done -- Vega might as well have been saying, instead, this better be good, so they are relatives, so it is understood.
"I'm sorry," Brande replies succinctly, a little too quickly, so that Vega is too quickly silent, too quickly leaves a void for devils to wind into. Continues the hell-addled alchemist: "I acted in anger. I have had... a disruptive year, and in my mind I thought I was protecting Mercedes."
Blood is something the Vega understands, and so is anger, he doesn't hang up. Brande's Madness is something he doesn't, but he's aware of it, of course, and so this rationale is for the moment, permissible, pending. The fact that he is upset with his mother, too, will only occur to him later -- some sick late-night gut-knife about Brande, some shard of him, being right, of ventilating sickness that had accumulated in his eaves, for the better.
"My sister is dead," says the alchemist with uncommon finality, sobriety. "I have sown a crop now I've no choice but to reap, but there are things I can accept in order to live among men."
Marius continues to listen to this. He isn't sure, maybe, exactly what the alchemist is saying, but he listens in a way that throbs, gilt-flecks in the blood, Hamlet's vengeful tincture creeping in through the ear and never so well-scented, so merciful.
"I've become involved with my patient," he says, and this is sort-of-not a lie, and Brande tells his cousin: "And she in turn is under the stewardship of a very old, very good family, and I've been invited to a party there."
Invited to a party is a stretch, and although he doesn't know that, it's even hard for Marius to believe, and yet he says, bluntly: "Good for you." Marius, too, deals only in half-lies and not full ones, and this the cousins have in common.
"I'd like to invite you," Brande says carefully. And perhaps that precision truly is due to care, the delicate treading round a fresh wound, and maybe the regret in his tone is real. It's too complex to tell. "It's been a long time since I've..." Pause, and it's mirthless-rueful, but his cousin can imagine his wan smile, like the one he used to give when young, conflicted about a boat trip or a whorehouse trip or about anything, really. "...been a socialite," Brande concludes, wryly.
"You aren't ever going to be any kind of socialite, you fucking Brande," says Marius, clipped. "Anyone who ever knew you wants nothing to do with you now."
Perhaps the silence on the line is the alchemist, pragmatic, calculating whether this is actually true. He does want, of course, to know the location of Naomi's baby's burial site, but there are so many reasons he can't ask her. He's wondering if Marius could do it, but perhaps the Vega will interpret his cousin's silence as repentance -- even though he knows better by now, has made the mistake of assigning repentance to Brande five, six, seven times too many.
"It's true," says Brande, though who knows what he means is true. "It's a good family," he asserts. "And Shannon's going."
"What for? You seeing her?" Skeptical, and maybe Brande could say yes and sow brilliant illusions of his changed-ness -- he is seeing Shannon, if only literally; just as he is involved with Milla in ways he takes care to allow others only to imagine at. Half lies, gilded, and blood is more important to Vega than gold, so he cannot be sure.
"No," he says. "But I would like you to meet my girlfriend."
I would like you to meet my girlfriend is new enough, is different enough, to satiate.
Vega says, a little darkly: "Fine. When?"
"I'll let you know," says Brande.
"Can I bring Jill?"
Pause. Genteel Brande says: "It's up to you." What he means is it's up to her, of course, and even Vega knows this, so he might as well let him have his pride.
Brande hangs up the phone and smiles and determines to buy Milla another dress. It isn't often that either of them attend parties.
--
of course you've seen everyone just comes around
and comes right back again
several time frames have been ignored
we brought them back to see and hear
and we go round our world in circles
just like you knew that we would
it's way out there somewhere not far away
do you think we can lift this shadow
do you think, do you think do you think
do you think at all?
because it's way out there somewhere
not far away
(we've been there too)
[-- circulatory system, 'the spinning continuous' (download)]
If when you call she comesFor youGive your all, boyWe shot the holes in the portable wellAnd that's why your boyfriend tracked usIn the wastes that the demons of hellAvoid as the road bendsAnd the pity of woman is the seed of our sainthoodBorn from a slack dinDone blasted by the archangel's light:"I hate your new boyfriend"We sow the songsThe earth bears our wrong, our palesWrongs, all along [-- swan lake, 'petersburg, liberty theater, 1914']
I keep my head on tight
I make my plans at night
And I don't sleep, I don't sleep
I don't sleep 'til it's light
Pulse flowing; someone buried alive
And if that head opens
We built a life of work
Where we're chained to the life
But that's fine; our blood is alive
You know our hearts beat time out very slowly
You know our hearts beat time
We're waiting for something that will never arrive
They're waiting for something that will never arrive
[--wolf parade, 'shine a light']
Hey there, do you understand
why I hold a dagger in my hand?
hey there, do you understand
why I hold a trigger in my hand?
--
"I thought you had a girlfriend again now," said Akina boredly. The alchemist watched her from the table as she moved barefoot in the kitchen, wearing her silk robe, opening the cabinets to look for the booze.
"In the den," he said, muffled by a cigarette, cradling the flame as if it came out of his palm. Akina, not realizing she'd been telegraphing so obviously the object of her search, paused, startled for a moment -- he was so spooky like that, sometimes -- before she remembered the breakfront in the other room, the one she didn't like to enter because of the death painting.
Not much could startle the woman's whiskey appetite, though, so after a beat she padded out of the room, returned with efficient grace, holding the bottle around the neck. It felt about as full as the last time she'd been here; he almost never drank, go figure.
Akina smoothed her long, long hair; the fancy braided updo she'd been wearing had half fallen out by now. Asked again: "What about the girlfriend, though?"
Brande was looking only at his knit fingers; Akina observed it was strange for him not to want to sleep by now. After a long pause to consider, he said, simply, in a low, unreadable tone. "What about her?"
"It's not like you," she said simply, cocking one hip out as if to indicate herself.
"Oh?" And at this he lifted his chin; "Lately you've been the authority on what is and isn't like me," he added a little darkly, mocking her with those cold, strange opium eyes that somehow turned her on more.
She knew well enough by now to be nonplussed, and simply raised a hairline eyebrow. "'Lately'? I haven't seen you in nearly three months." She hated his inexplicable cheap cigarettes, and lit one of her own, pinched between long ceramic nails. "But I've known you since we were, what?"
"Dunno," said Brande, and with his black hand, he waved his cigarette smoke as if dismissing the subject. He was surly on the laudanum, and Akina estimated ten, fifteen minutes at the most until he reached for it again.
"Did you break up tonight?"
"No."
"Have a fight?"
Pause, just long enough for him to laugh, silently, at the idea. "No."
"Was it her who sent you the fruit basket, or another one?"
"Why don't you ever send me anything?" He retorted casually, detachedly, leaning back in the kitchen chair.
"I don't work at the restaurant much these days," she said. "More and more with my brother."
"Then have your sister send me something. Or just have her come over herself."
Akina, who had been in the act of studying her reflection in her little compact mirror, looked sharply over her shoulder. She never took anything Brande said personally -- almost never -- but she still put her hand on her hip, a smiling a little defiantly with her red, red mouth. "Oh, is that it? Am I getting too old for you now?"
If she was, he wouldn't have said so, and if she wasn't, he wasn't going to reassure her, so he said nothing.
"Did you sleep with me because the new one's not even legal yet?" She tossed out. He gave her a dark, dark look, and flicked his gaze away like the withdrawal of a prize, and Akina disliked the territory she realized too late she was skirting.
"Sorry," she said, even while being perfecly aware she was the one who ought to feel insulted. Brande had a way like that, and she rather liked it most of the time. "It's none of my business."
His silence affirmed this, but she feared it, just like she liked to sleep beside him so long as she didn't wake up in the dark, in that inexplicable, noiseless air.
"It's because I need not to break her," he said after a while, and offering an explanation was just as unlike him as pity. But it didn't look like gentleness in his eyes; it looked like something Akina had never seen in him, and she didn't know what to say, for once.
"You won't break me," was what she decided on, and she endeavored to make her tone as light as possible, as if the density in the room needed help to be carried.
"I know," he said, and it was dark, detatched, and strange.
Then he said, "You should go now, Akina."
"At two a.m.? Brande, I don't ever understand you." She was, truth be told, a little put-off; if anyone could get away with throwing her out in the street like a common tramp, it was him, but it still felt so stupidly vulnerable.
"Sorry," he murmured unexpectedly, lips against his own knit fingers, and although he didn't look at her, she knew he actually meant it, and somehow that was worse. She and Brande had long had a certain understanding, and so she was well beyond caring much about the rest of his business, but she suddenly wished she hadn't asked about the girlfriend.
"It wouldn't kill you to let me stay in the guest room," Akina told him crossly.
"You can't," he replied succinctly, and then smiled dryly, cryptically, mirthlessly. "My girlfriend wouldn't like it."
--
Upon distant sands
the waves fall heavily
feels heavy like my head in my hands, what I don't understand
You keep calling back on me
You kick me out, yet you keep me in demand
The other day you looked the other way
hey, hey, I need to get away
the other day you looked the other way
hey, hey, you tried to get away
the waves fall heavily
feels heavy like my head in my hands, what I don't understand
You keep calling back on me
You kick me out, yet you keep me in demand
The other day you looked the other way
hey, hey, I need to get away
the other day you looked the other way
hey, hey, you tried to get away
[-- the apples in stereo, 'do you understand?' (listen)]
i wish that i had known in that first minute we met
the unpayable debt that I owed you
because you'd been abused
by that bone that refused you
and you hired me to make up for that
walking in that room when you had tubes in your arms
those singing morphine alarms out of tune
kept you sleeping and even
and i didn't believe them
when they called you a hurricane thunderclap
when i was checking vitals I suggested a smile
when i was checking vitals I suggested a smile
you didn't talk for a while; you were freezing
you said you hated my tone
it made you feel so alone
and so you told me i ought to be leaving
but something kept me standing by that hospital bed
i should have quit
but instead i took care of you
you made me sleep and uneven
and I didn't believe them
when they told me there was no saving you.
[--the antlers, 'kettering' (it's in the sidebar playlist)]
I could have taken Milla with me to drive back for Persephone; probably, I could have told Shannon to go with me. She's always humanizing the maid. I could have even called Persephone, to see if she could have heard from so far off, how long it would have taken her to travel back herself. I had a feeling it would've been fine.
But I'm driving at three a.m. because I need to. It's too much. I hadn't realized how much the summer took out of me, how fragile has been my grasp in the last month, and now that I'm finally alone, it all comes unraveling out of me, everything I took on. At such a strange hour, and having taken such a heavy dose, it feels like a better time, when there was only the Ten and I and our journeys, and none of this noise.
I never had to see my family, sick Aunt, tiresome cousin -- ugh, and now that woman, stinking of fertility and infant and constant want, like she wants me to--
I never had to have anyone else's dreams.
Why didn't I just fucking take Milla last night? Why did I talk to The Star, why can't I fucking focus?
Now, too, there's something new and dreadful knotted and half-dead in my gut when I think about my sister's grave; yesterday, when I was there, and tonight, when I pass it again (slowing, but not stopping). It's that I'm not just thinking that it's the last place I saw Mercedes' face. I'm thinking it's the last place I saw Phina's, and it pulls at me, it makes me fevered and furious and fucking sick.
My sister. I used to wait at her burial site half-praying she'd come to bring me with her. Waiting there for anything else desecrates it. So I took Milla, yesterday. Showed her the place, and asked her to pray. Just like last year; to replace the memory.
Mercedes would have been pleased for me not to be alone. She always worried, like that. Phineas -- had she been standing just out of Our range of vision, as I tried not to imagine her to be, would not have let on she was jealous, she'd say only, "I'm tired, Mr. Brande" --
My sister used to beg me to love others, to be with others. Maybe she thought I'd suffer too much when she died, otherwise. She hated herself for her illness; I thought she felt unworthy of me, or that I'd wander from her anyway. Maybe she blamed herself for -- she thought -- making me sin for her. Tonight, though, I wonder if she meant it. Was she martyring, in the way girlchildren sometimes do? Maybe she was asking me to prove my devotion.
It's disturbing to think that I only knew Mercedes through the eyes of an earlier lifetime.
I have thought of her as my root and my anchor and my most beautiful memory for ages, now, but I have not remembered her as a girl, as my girl, in years, and I am nauseated at how I've betrayed her. I must have taken an overdose; I have to pull the car over to wait for it to pass, the throbbing wave, the Ten, my sickness.
Our mind is playing tricks on me. I can smell my own blood, just a little, but I'm glad of it. The ill ichor that built in me at the lakehouse is ebbing out, and we'll be fine.
I keep driving, a perfect one-hundred-twenty miles per hour, in the straightest, the straightest line.
Gold will stay
It's coming in waves
It's in this way
Gold will stay
Now I know how We're trying to communicate
Because in this way
Gold will stay
Could you erase every tape we've made?
Could you scatter the things you've saved?
It's coming in waves
It's in this way
Gold will stay
Now I know how We're trying to communicate
Because in this way
Gold will stay
Could you erase every tape we've made?
Could you scatter the things you've saved?
[--circulatory system, 'gold will stay']
