I'm not sure how long I slept, how long I dreamed of the names of monsters, ones I've called and ones I've yet to learn. The name of my sister, names of my lovers, of the children I've never had, of the child of my cousin and my lover, placing all these even before my mother and father. I dreamed in names and in trees, in mastery and in miracles, in disasters and divinity, and when I heard the sound of a bottle-message clinking against the shore I woke.
In the mirror my face is something like how I recall it again, all the ghosts properly arranged in my eyes, the skin tone of a man who can't die, the maps of my veins gently concealed again, the litany of names spelled quietly into the close of my lips.
When I go out to the yard there's no evidence that Lark's cat has been here again, and yet I know it has. Stone sober for the first time in weeks, the sound of my own thought draining gently back into my awareness is like the recession of the sea. I wonder, numbly, if Marius and Jill are back from England. I wonder what I've done to their baby. I wonder if Ray's wife is pregnant.
One of the letters in my mailbox is from him, and the other, surprisingly, is from Milla. It's that she wrote it that surprises me, not its contents -- her words, I've decided and you can are practically transporting, transformative.
I'm awake and alive. I'm pleased. Jill likes the word happy, and this is as close as it gets, even mingled with the dread of beginning again.
Once again, I and all my names have things to do.
[dear rp pals, i will be away from sunday til saturday on bizness. presume aden is sleeping off his issues, marius is out of the country. i'll be on the computer nearly constantly cause of work, so send me mail, epost, whatever if you want/need anything. thanks to all of you for everything, can't wait to resume when i get back <3]
When Milla's leaving, I feel as if I can finally sleep. Exhaustion. I can feel her downstairs before I fully fall asleep, and I am so frayed that it feels like she needs to stay there in order for me to be able to rest.
So the Seven of Wands is next. Leading to Death? What a strange diversion -- my sleep is unraveling in elemental chains, I think of healing branches and fractured spirits, the compounds that comprise a human mind, whether they can be transmuted, whether madness' beast has a name, images racing fast like horsemen across the backs of my lids.
For once, it's not Naomi's baby, Jill's, or any of the dreams of the Ten that are beyond my living capacity to articulate in words. It's spring earth and new buds and the whitelace, flower-petal hem of my sister's skirt at her knee.
Milla shuts the door downstairs as she exits, and the sound lances its way into my diminishing consciousness, interrupts the scene -- for one arresting moment it's Jill wearing Mercedes' dress, and I wake up suddenly raw, I'm laudanum-sick into the bathroom sink and I fear I won't be able to get back to bed.
But I do. God, merciful blackness, silence, only the rushing of blood in my ears that sounds like the sea, swimming through the silt and elements of the soul, and nothing around me makes any noise. If only I could really let go, just surrender to the silence and truly rest for the first time in some seventeen years, but I don't dare. Maybe we'd be fine. Maybe the world would end, if I really turned my back.
We have no choice but to believe it is possible, I told Milla.
Poor, pretty orphan.
--
and I'd like to watch the white flesh of your heels
as they take turns
breaking the desert heat to beckon me
in languages I've never learned
and I'd like to have you navigate two hills where no musicians live
and
on the way decide what mendings of your will you're willing to forgive
you go on ahead for awhile
I would like to just follow you awhile
[sunset rubdown, 'you go on ahead']
The sky is just a slightly paler shade of gray when morning comes. The sun won't be here today.
It takes longer than I'd like before my numb hands obey me enough to answer the phone. I have a vague, addled recollection of planning to call someone, but I can't remember who. Still, it feels right that it's Marius on the other line -- maybe that was it. I can't get my mouth to obey me either, so what comes out is unintelligible.
"Fucking Brande," Marius says, and he sounds angry at me. "Where the fuck have you been? Weren't you supposed to come back here?"
"Changed plans," I tell him.
"The fuck is wrong with you?"
"I'm sick," I tell him.
"You sure as shit are," says Marius, and I can't tell why he's so angry. "Can you listen to me, or are you high?"
"I prefer the word medicated."
"Fuck yourself, Junior. Listen, I'm going away for a little while. With Jill."
"Congratulations," I say. I really, really don't want to talk about her with him, right now. But there's a silence, and it's complex, and in it I can hear that there are things he needs to say, wants to ask me. Maybe he can feel the change in her current. Maybe he's seen it in the kid already.
"We're giving the kid my name, I think," Marius tells me. "If she wants to, I mean. I was thinking August Lucian, after my mother."
I really don't want to talk about Luciana with him, either, so I don't say anything.
"Why the fuck haven't you come to see the kid, Brande?" He gets to the point. I'm not sure if he's hurt or he just can't get his head around me.
Because I don't want to poison it. Because I don't want to lose control. Because it makes me uncomfortable.
"Because I don't fucking care," I tell him, and that's not entirely untrue either. We have things to do.
I expect him to yell at me, but he doesn't. He must be happy about something. Going away with Jill? Giving the kid his name? Maybe the thing Marius is unwilling to admit to me is that he's forgiven her.
Instead, Marius says, "You're getting worse, you know."
"I'm getting closer," I tell him.
There's a silence in which we both understand we don't want me near his baby. That it's best for me to stay away.
That's when I hear some kind of sound in the yard, an animal yowling, maybe running through the hedge. I look outside, and there's that cat. Lark's cat. Maybe I hadn't dreamed it up after all. Still holding the phone, I watch it go off down the street.
"Are you still alive over there, sister-fucker?" Marius' voice comes from the phone.
But I'm looking at my car. The morning condensate; someone's written stay away in it several times. I can see it perfectly from this angle. I feel a little dizzy; can taste salt or blood in my mouth. Of course.
I don't feel much of anything. I'm fairly sure where it comes from -- but of course, it could have been anything.
I hang up on Marius.
---
but your help was a hurt
a motivational welt
wounds and their salts
and the ill milk in your bones
and you whisper to your knees
['city calls', swan lake]
He's not normal, she said.
I'd be lying if I said I was happy she had my cousin's child to begin with. The fact that I had touched her, changed her, only makes it worse. When she said that, I wasn't surprised at all.
That's what they used to say of me, when I was a boy. And if they've stopped, it's only because they're afraid I'll hear it.
My layers are thinned; I can hear something that sounds like Lamia laughing. I'm exhausted, still bled-out, still dangerous, and we need rest, but I dread closing my eyes because of the dreams I know will come.
It's relieving, appropriate, to be back in the old place. Everything is very nearly where it should be, except my Persephone is not here. And my cousin is a father -- and I haven't even told him about his mother, my father. And Thanatos is all over the Tower, my body aches no matter how much I dose --
This is not how it should be at all. At this point I've had to take so much that I can hardly see the room around me. In my daze I can envision Mercedes beside me -- as if I'm the one who's always been frail, and she brushes my hair back. The nerve-hands of the Ten lacing my skull, I can almost imagine they're her hands.
Sometimes she's caressing and sometimes she's choking me, cold serpentine scales around my neck --
Need to stay conscious. I cannot lose.
Naomi's in the room, my pregnant wife, neurotic in her last month, pacing around. I couldn't sleep in those days, because I was afraid of what the agents would do, feared her swollen belly, couldn't rest for the sound of her bare feet against the floorboards, her swollen ankles, the rasp of her hands rubbing her abdomen again and again.
And you don't even care, her voice floats to me through the laudanum high. She's spilt it out three times this week, but I can always get more. She cries. She says, you're not normal.
She's in bed beside me, and I know this part well. The smell of her blood and the sound of her screaming flood the air, like a rising tide I can't transmute, sick sound, sick scent, spoiled milk, and the ocean is crashing around the edges of my mattress.
I can still taste the salt of Naomi's stupid tears, and it becomes the salt and sigh of the sea, where Lark is standing a few yards away. I'm not sure how long I have been unconscious when I hear the phone ringing -- it's Ray calling to tell me his wife is pregnant, it's Milla calling to remind me about the Garden --
And it seems a black cat, lousy with mange, passes like a dark lightning close to my face and I surface like I'm breaking the water, gasping for air, it's draining away, the white edges from my vision, the blood, the sea, and I'm in my room and it's almost morning.
I feel my heart surge unsteadily in my ribs, like a knocking at a door, roaring back awake, pumping my blood, insisting on living, and I don't feel much of anything.
The phone is ringing.
--
Oh where's the keeper, where's the keeper of the full-time, daytime sleeper?
And all my hands arrest
Their frozen song, their claw, their paw upon my blessed breast
So cry and whine
Whilst guest speakers sink into brine
Well I'm a send-up of a hollowed tradition true
You better hold tight because even cancer needs a home
['russian berries but you're quiet tonight,' Frog Eyes]
It was a good thing that woman didn't need a ride.
Knew I'd dosed too heavily. I'd taken two when we got out of the water, quick-sick heavy high, as if to insulate myself from the knowledge that I was doing it. Ha. Over-medicate to forget you're over-medicating, like a snake eating its own tail. Really, though, I did it because of the noise of my own skin tearing, the familiar old pain that I knew was on its way. Once she was out of my sight, out of my (our) mind's eye, I couldn't fucking drive fast enough.
Half an hour later, I've pulled over on the faceless highway in the cold, lying in the hard-cold scoop of a ditch like a shallow grave. It was made by car tires in a time when the air was warmer, when the dirt was wetter, maybe it was I who'd been here before, maybe this was where I and my musegirl --
It did feel, in many ways, like coming back. I can smell my own blood, feel the dull ache of the Ten lacerating my tree, little snake of tearing skin crawling up the spine to circle an arcana that feels like Binah, maybe Tiphareth too, it hurts too much to tell. And over the heavy-metal elemental iron and carmot scent of me, I can smell, from far away, the thaw in the air.
Winter's almost over. And though I'm lying here high as hell and feeling like I'm dying, the pain's fucking good -- I've survived another Winter. I know I'm surviving, because I'm here dying again.
Maybe it was this time last year that I reversed the Star. It was, wasn't it? I'm so delusional in agony that I can see Payton; when I close my eyes against the blissful-sickening white distortion swell of my opiate, I can convince myself she's standing right in front of me, unmoving, silent and merciless, knowing better now than to touch me, to try and save me. I feel so surely that I see her, that I've seen her -- was that her brother, earlier tonight? It was, wasn't it?
I have a good twenty minutes of pain so bad -- they wanted you, Lark, they wanted your name -- that it's all I can do just to keep us all from coming apart, eyes closed, drifting in some space between this layer and the last, or the next, divinity and nothingness, and in those moments it's Mercedes I can feel standing close to me, waiting either to lift me up or to leave me alone at last. I can taste my blood vaguely when I call for mercy -- for her, Mercie.
You wouldn't enjoy it, Lark said of our deal. No, probably not, I remember kissing Phineas' skinned knee, which hurt something like this, but it was worth it for her oracle fingers climbing the ladder of my spine to dress my wounds --
There is nobody here to save me now. Only time and entropy, both of whom take me for granted. And so I must only lie still and wait, wait for the dose to press me down into the earth, wait for their rage to dance more peacefully in my toxic blood. Why, why did I ask Lark for something like that? Damned muses. Damn. Fucking god, my hunger, I swallow three times just to taste my own blood --
And I can taste the salt of the ocean on my lips, feel it stinging in my wounds, and there's my sister's ghost again, always just outside my peripheral vision where everything blurs and blood-tinges. I can hear the rattle of my breath, and it sounds like death although I know I won't die. It sounds like the sighing of the sea. I want to recall how she looked, standing in the water, how base I felt, how white she was, but we must keep from thinking of it now.
The earth beneath my cheek feels painfully alive. The agony and the laudanum-nausea are beginning to recede, gently, but it will be hours before I can see straight, think straight, stand, drive. In a little more time I can reach for my phone and call -- who? There's no one, and yet something in me's throbbing fucking save us, mercy, and I know I'm a man still, to have a beast's survival instinct, something I haven't been able wholly to kill, and I watch it aching and calling as if from far away.
Shannon. She won't be coming to pick me up, this time. And I don't need a hospital anymore. We just need divinity and time.
Can't call Jill. I'm too proud, and it might drive me too mad right now, the Tower and her mother-scent, my cousin's child.
Can't call Ray. He cannot see me like this. Not ever.
Phineas, I've been calling silently for months now. In the old days Delphi would answer you -- today if you go, there's nothing there. Phineas is not here, and so I don't even try. Later, healed and sober, I'll be plagued by the idea that had I only called her once, softly, she would have come up the hillside in her dirty shoes, calmly Here, Daddy, and sang me to rest.
Milla, poor Milla -- this is too much noise.
Vega would send someone, but I'd never hear the end of it. I don't want the inconvenience.
In the end I lie there and bleed until it's light, I have dreams of the end, and when it is over I get us all up and drive home again. I'm used to it.
It's nothing.
--
i put a hex on the telephone wire
in hope that the spires of communication
might take a leave of absence
expectations confounded
when the girl became grounded and packed her bags
for the beaches with contracts
and breaches of contracts
and the freedom
to be alone with the freedom
I was getting older
I was going down
If you always get up late
You'll never be on time
If you always make it after work
Oh the day never comes
(and I stand up, waiting on...)
I saw you down there
I know you were tired
I saw you
You looked like a swimmer
['swimmer', broken social scene]
If you're uncomfortable with silence
Let me shower you with these silly violets
You can listen to the petals
As they spin down and settle on your skin, oh
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin, oh
But my voice is tired
And my voice is rough
My arms are tired
And my aim is off
It's the kind of day
Where lovers stay home
I know you know the pain
I know you know the pain
Of entering your name into the lottery again and again
No no
I know I know
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle for your skin
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin
I'll settle on your skin, oh
My voice is tired
And my voice is rough
My arms are tired
And my aim is off
So get ready
I am the ice
And I am a volcano
Que sera sera
I am the bow and I am the arrow
[swan lake, spencer krug's 'settle on your skin,' mindblowingly fucking amazing]
JL,
I don't know if you'll be like that for a little while, or forever. I could make it stop, but that might harm the balance, somehow. The result might be worse. After all, I didn't expect this would happen to begin with, so perhaps my arts are not so perfect after all, yet.
I think I know what you mean by "pieces of me in scraps of you." That's why we are so uncomfortable with each other.
Happy is a hollow word. I can't remember the last time I knew happiness in the way you mean, but with the way I've lived, I've come to discover a certain unimportance to the idea. That's another one of the things -- a common human spirit -- that I've traded away to be what I am now, and to walk the path that I do.
I was happy for a while over the summer, but I'm paying for it, now. That's how the universe is; it demands its balance from me. I'll take my balance from it in the end, though, and that's probably the closest thing to happiness that I can achieve. Truthfully, I get chills when I think of it, too.
You should rest. I knew you were injured even before I heard from Marius -- because of the Tower and Thanatos, I can feel it. Careful of those drafts.
And I wouldn't laugh. You should be scared of me. Especially now. Be well.
Fidelis,
AMB
Persephone's absence is even more noticeable now that I am back in the old home. But I can feel -- and the cards say -- that the complexities that led me to avoid going to Shannon's may soon resolve themselves. We'll see.
But just when I think we'll go mad from the quiet, my ghosts and I, who should come by but the Tower. We could feel her coming for miles, some kind of fingerprint of Thanatos all over her that's made her mad. Like a door that's opened that I didn't close? Some thread I meant to sever, but didn't?
Is this because of what I did at Milla's, does the Tower path react too?
As far as I can tell, it's like an echo off of her skin, some reverberation that will fade in time. The interesting question is, if it is tied to me in any way, what would happen if I used Thanatos upright? Would she die?
Your kindness, she said. Doll, you've been my lover -- don't you know me by now? My Christlike, ascendant kindness. Ha.
And I'm not done with Jill. When she gets up that close to me, the Tower's heartline pulls like a thread of bloodsoaked twine, knotting this mote of dread in my gut that tells me I'll never be done with her, no matter how much I want to. This is another puzzle to unpuzzle, another path to unravel, another seal to unseal, things that can be named, changed.
This is the only reason I exist anymore.
Must not tell Marius she was here. I'd have known by her eyes, by the sweet, small way she said his name, even if I couldn't smell El Caesar Vega all around and through her. With my fucking blessings, cousin -- so this is why you haven't called. He doesn't want to talk about her, but if he sees her like this, I'm sure we'll be hearing from him soon. There are buried things in our family that can only stay hidden for so long, besides.
Everything comes back in circles. Once again, they call me saint while I sin and sin.
And I’ve heard of pious men
And I’ve heard of dirty fiends
But you don’t often hear
Of us ones in between
['us ones in between,' sunset rubdown]
