Anonyma Read online

  IX.

  Bezalel approaches the four figures. They are wearing black hooded robes. Their faces are not visible. One of the figures hands a set of robes to Bezalel. He begins to remove his suit to put them on.

  Bezalel, in black robes and flanked on both sides by two of the robed figures, approaches from a distant part of the room. The echo suggests some vast hall or auditorium. Lying on the floor is the actress who played Ariette. She is naked and covered in scratches, bruises, and blood. Her wound has been bandaged, but it appears that it will eventually be fatal. She breathes shallowly, drifting in and out of consciousness. Bezalel and the figures stop in front of her, now illuminated by some unseen light source. Bezalel looks quite different yet again. His hair is a mess, his eyes are glassy and sunken, and his skin is pale. Bezalel is menacing.

  Two of the figures take out a cryptic-looking crown with vast, dark horns upon it. They place it upon Bezalel’s head, completing his evil attire. The actress stirs, letting out a painful moan as she reaches a more wakeful state. Bezalel looks at her and smiles slightly. The figures stand tall behind him as he looks down at her. The first figure to Bezalel’s right reaches out and throws a fistful of dirt on her body. Bezalel looks at him and laughs slightly. It seems they share some private joke. The girl writhes as the dirt enters her wounds. The man to Bezalel’s immediate left shifts nervously.

  Bezalel leans down and runs his hands over the body of the girl. She can be no more than seventeen. Tears run down her face as he runs his hands down her stomach and towards her groin. She lets out a loud moan as he reaches his hand into her private parts. He stands again and reaches his hands out. The lights flicker. One of the figures hands Bezalel a long knife. He closes his eyes, holding it and concentrating deeply. He then leans down and whispers in the girl’s ear. The girl closes her eyes and nods weakly, mouthing the word “yes.” Bezalel runs one hand down her chest and stomach again, running the knife behind it slightly on her skin. It does not cut her, but the cold makes her hyperventilate and flinch in expectation.

  He continues to run the knife up and down her body, being careful not to cut her. He is teasing her with the thought of butchery. Bezalel begins to cut her from the groin to her stomach. Blood pours from her.

  ▼

  I ask him where he has been this night. There is no answer. Thunder from the distant mountains. There are no windows. He looks into my eyes, and earth, no longer firmly rooted, will fade like so many stars into the abyss.

  I stand before the worst of them, if prior taunts were honest. Memory flames shot between teeth. I will speak no more, not wanting to live. I can still see the milky water running down my face. Taste its gentle salts—feel the cold rush wash over my youthful chest. I come back to reality amid this mess, without feeling.

  He tells me a story of a tree, deep in the desert, with five enormous wings.

  He says “do not believe the worst,” but I have known the worst of men. Unforgiving in their joys, the breeding ground for ignorance.

  In my seat, a memory woman screams my name. Not my given name, with all its bells and burdens, but the one I have not heard in years. I remember.

  There is no noble love beneath the hate of God. I met them in the dark years, knowing then that I was in over my head. He’ll spit in the sacred place under heaving stars. Might they fill my womb with the batter of the firmament, wrapped in velvet? Tongues sink into spider rings. A tyrant of the deep. Purity cooked under lights of deep red. I am always received as one of them.

  Nights of lovely piano sounds are replaced with bloody vomit.

  I look at him without love. He does not know me. There is no mask of nonsense so effective. Drawn back in agitation (or love), I dance a dream of passionate death for eons in my seat. It would be an absurdity, to love me. A deficient always in a daze, with quiet, muffled depths like frozen oceans. Only those whose love is treacherous and vague may find their way to the side of me. Even then, there is no nourishment for the body or the mind. I lean towards the precipice of life and death, always mixing glitter with these scars of mine.

  I grow weary of the war within. He tells me that he loves me and my faith has turned to fog. He runs his teeth and tongue over me, eyes of greed becoming of the madness. I am dead at heart, as much as the first day. I remember his fingers in my mouth – once sweet, passionate. Now they graze my lips with that alien aggression.

  I look at my gentle face. The delicacy, the innocence of that time. I mourn for that girl, as I mourn for any girl wandering in this world with magic in their hearts and hell in their eyes.

  His laugh had the cadence of birdsong. Evil is soundless, I tell myself. This cocoon of menace fondles me tighter.I strain my eyes between two faces. One fresh, one fractured.

  False comforts are counted on high. This, either enchanted puzzle or despairing labyrinth, weights heavily without definition. I grant myself love in gushes, just to taste a sliver of the real.I wish myself endlessness in the morning. Privacy, protection, rest. I live in dread of the light that will wake him across the city. It is not a fatal blow. This is his decision. I am alive.

  X.

  I am Anonyma. This I will remember in the darkest moments. I send the remnants of myself up into the clouds, to hover over bloodless hearts and tearless torment. In this way, I will live beyond these moments. I know that I will start again someday.

  Nicholas speaks of his old wish, but I will not listen anymore. I am tired of the pursuit of power. His rage is rooted. He can’t fathom a woman being so profound. Not in history, not before him now.

  He ties the barbed wire around my arms, yanking them every third loop to set the edges in deep. Blood and sperm poured from my lips—the numbness and swelling making it impossible to close them. This is dark magic. This magic has darkened me.

  Are you ever a woman until you feel the pain of she?

  I remember it all, as clearly as I see this place—thousands of headstones laid out before my eyes. Lives as rich as mine. Lives as empty. All the in-betweens. I wonder what another may have done in that mess. Then I think to myself that I lived this because only I was meant for such a thing. How hard that is, to fathom. That alone, we are born to know such horrors intrinsic to ourselves. Our blood. Our cells.

  I want to believe that he loves me, but love to a man is a very different concept. I think it is, primarily to them, a strain of possession. In the case of Nicholas, this is true. I cannot speak for other men, really. I have not known them. I have only known this hammer upon my head. This burden of the heart. Even in my unfamiliarity with all things passion and intimate, I know this is not love.

  I want to be a mother, but perhaps it is not meant to be. I can tell by my mind, and the nightmares of failure in that regard. He pines for the blue lady, and I am tired of the fascination. I see only myself in her fading form, longing to escape the peering eyes of men.

  In a dream, I leave the bridge, soul intact, my cloak dragging through the snow in streaks of soul blood. Red, purple, black. Stripe after stripe leading a trail of darkness behind me.

  “What mist is this, that crowds my eyes with melancholy?”

  He speaks, and I know it to be false concern. My stomach screams in the twisted agony. Ecstasy and horror. He who once was death, in flesh, has returned with all the glory of the resurrection.

  I have translated the passage for him. The ritual will be dark—decadent. A host of spirits from the eight parallel worlds, hovering in the slipstreams—waiting for me, though I will not see them there. This was his dark design at its most precious.

  Delicate veils hide demonic faces. The forest trembles, electricity rumbling through every beech and oak. Bark peels, branches curl. Smoke erupts from the belly of the mutilated goat. A bleeding hand--mine-- reflects in the stillness of its eyes. This is not my work. This is not my life.

  I ask madness, “what of these enchantments? These illusions? These lies?”

  I lick the blue bones of his hand and he responds with a question. I res
pond with the only thing I can say in this world.

  “No.”

  With the burden of my senses magnified in this colorless company, I know myself to be at the mercy of grey souls. Though to assign some supernatural significance to my own brought me to the edge of vomiting. I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. This I knew in earnest, pinching flesh. But as myself, untouched—a soul, cradled by voiceless voices from some sacred beyond—I know myself to be something. Not better or worse than the rest. Not special. Only pre-destined for horror and magnificence in turns. In this way, I could be nothing and not be ashamed. This is but the earth, after all.

  Coreya stands by the mangled white oak, carving sigils into the trunk with her pocket knife. Nicholas has disappeared to some shadowed edge of the forest to gather his senses (or senselessness). Ignatius stretched like a deranged lamb in the center of the clearing, flocked by Marina, Rai, and Leilan. The others linger, watching every length and limb of me so that I stand no chance of escape.

  The old goat, a blind with a decided limp, is carried to the circle by Mars. Two baby goats are led on leashes to the circle.

  “But… I thought but the one would…”

  “Three sacrifices, my love. That is the way of this.”

  They cut the throat of the goat and the gash spills blackest blood.

  His rituals are endless, but I am not forced. I am equally accountable, aren’t I?

  The angels are not absent, only sleeping.

  Lithe prayers reach into the night, up unto sapphire clouds.

  I am consumed by reserve. This evil is my doing.

  He tells me that I owe him, but a dead thing owes no one.

  We need no priests here. No pomp and circumstance.

  He has the look of Von Aurovitch. The high cheekbones, watery blue eyes, and curly platinum hair. They shared a dark, whimsical charisma, particularly powerful in the company of evil. Tonight, they could be the same man.

  I am anonymous. I shed the air from my breast and reach to stroke wings that aren’t there. Becoming smaller, wilted, ash and nothing. I remember trembling with anger. The others pant and discharge their regrets. The ritual hasn’t worked this time, they spit. I feel a growing enormity-- the amphitheatre of the heart. They are wrong. They simply did not see as one must see. As one happens to see by chance. In the pandemonium of the nightmare orgy, all eyes are turned away from me. No one sees my fragile feet lift from the soil, hovering in the bluish half-haze of broken time. The light against the womb, in my eyes.

  He walks over to me. Through him I feel the dense weight of earthly loss. Saturated with the whims of feminine meditation. The crowd thins and the girls grow paler. I feel the storm of life pressed against my stomach. A birth that will pierce a thousand veils of light, soaking a warm July night with lunar fascination. I hold his poor, profane face in my hands. He touched his lip to mine—their inhuman softness pulsing. The ancient paradox of nature holds me back. Ornaments and objects as preternatural wonder.

  About to pull the knife from wrist to throat, I realize that my home is in myself.

  ▼

  Walking home, alone, I am a woman under a mass of stars. This thick deceit of flesh throbs with a beating. I roll myself in red waves- as dead as dead can be. Grass and vines reach out to hold my hand as I pass the river in the heart. Where have I gone? I am not in this empty house. I am not in this empty life. Asking with the fullness of infinity, knowing good things in the dust can’t venture far.

  For little girls who know they live in worlds far from their own.

  I’ve danced with men I didn’t love and cried in want of those who would not be mine. I step on my own wetness on the stairs and know the gestation of the heart has been fatal. I feel the madness in my body live again.

  XI.

  The apparition of our future slumps beside me on the bed. I am his wife in name-only. My husband is fresh with memory. His heart races. Empty eyes perform ritual sweeps—fantasy-love, a splinter of the real.

  “I love you as much as I am able to love a person.”

  I imagine years beyond this. Our daughter retreats into her room, awake with the earth, asleep in the universe. He moves dispassionately around her, an opaque vision of a child that should-have-been. My silence bursts open, mouth gleaming with the silver haze of distance. I am in love, without myself.

  Golden light gleams on white morning walls. I step outside the front door, undressed, lost to the sickness. People stare. My husband is not here. They see the heart-wounds, oozing black salt, the smell of sulphur. Ghosts are morning-born, beside me. I feel the urge—the heat of the earth-guiding me as I fall.

  “I love you as much as I am able to love a person.”

  Scraping sounds surround me—midnight hounds clawing against broken glass. I flinch and awaken in a storm of teeth-gnashing, snarling, dripping saliva onto my breasts.

  The sky is black. A fissure breaks in the distance. Wind stirs golden leaves up in amethystine light. My mind oscillates through the fears of my heart--- succumbing to doom-design—the mythic feature of the Scaearulldytheraeum.

  I am without a body as the teeth fade into the mist. Liquid washes over my skull. My gaze falls to my wrist, blossoming red vines that move like newt tails. They glow and shrivel, dropping away from me. The scar is a glistening patch of skin—ivory velvet to the touch. I have one memory of myself—a glasswork phoenix in black lamplight, and I awaken, as cold as death—rising from the bed without emotion.

  The last letter of luxury in the ailing house is the clawfoot bath tub. Dark mold crawls up the aging porcelain in places where, underneath the weight of a house mother’s hand, there may have been a striking glow. There will be no such care in this house.

  Sick eyes stare into the mirror again. I hold the razor’s edge to my jet-black hair and take three violent cuts. Once-flowing locks are now blunt tendrils, falling above the ears. My hair has a 20s-flapper look to it, if a flapper had ever been caught in a wood chipper. I peer into the drain at the lost strands of black, clotted together in a damp mass of dream-blood.

  Rusty pipes rattle as I draw the bath. My hand touches the porcelain and I shutter—a momentary fragment of real life. The breakthrough is not enough. As I place my fingers beneath the faucet to feel a growing warmth, I recall my mother as she recounted the tale of her Great Aunt’s near-drowning as a child. Exhausted from swimming in the worst heat of the season, she began to succumb to the depths of the lake. The peculiar part of the recollection had always been the music she heard that soothed her as she sunk below the surface. A gentle, calming song from that could only have been from heaven itself, or so she proclaimed. Her father rescued her before she drowned, and she lived to tell the tale to her many relatives, including mother, who was petrified of water.

  I press the cold blade tip against my chest and know I am loved by this coldness. If nothing else, in blood, in light, I know it by the kiss of killing metal. I believe I will be blessed with a particular uselessness after all.

  I have no fear of water. I slip into its warmth. A pale, nude figure, obscured beneath the gentle rippling, grows more still with each breath. Pressing the razor against my inner arm, I trace a gentle line vertically down to my wrist, where the cut will go. I press again, and watch flesh burrow up around the metal.

  My death procession is bright red. Slipping down down down into the bathwater. Everything I decide is usurped by tiredness. I rebel inwardly against myself, in dread of love, knowing only a veil of weakness, the march of theatric fright. I fool even myself without ferocity, but it is there. Buried deep—a fathomless strength beneath every fitful sob. My eyelids drop as I remember him. Might a cascade of dust fall out of his nostrils, revealing himself to the world? My eyes sink into the pool of impossibility. There is no music.

  I recall the act of trembling in the arms of a madman. Powder pink roses sit on his desk. Terror blooms—a blanket of pus, dampening the memory-the refuge that was once shared lives. He is no longer familiar. Every spoken
word, a stranger. Every glance inflames the senses. The depths of a yellow autumn and wafts of mold creep up from the old floorboards. Beauty was once there, but in the crazy swarm of routine, the fever of dreams, I had to make the attempt. Eternally sad in a dream of motherhood, deep-set eyes weeping. His coffin, no doubt, would smell of tea and mine of a weeping womb. I broke through this submission, taking ownership of myself.

  I am in the jaws of the afterlife without having fulfilled my earthly promises. It is in this way that one feels a sense of guilt when the blood pours out. I had not the courage for the convulsions one gets from poison. One slice to the arm and I was whisked into a scented, spaceless night. He rushed into the room. His cold hand presses against my neck. Dark blood sputters up like spirit larvae. I wander in the artist’s semi-darkness, green blood gushing and all manner of mind game stretching beyond the alien comforts of calm weather. I can feel him there, but it is too late.

  In Nicholas Bezalel, I recognize the darkest part of myself. Feel his dark energy, at once vulnerable and outraged, as I cross over. The delicate strain of old torment, wondering why such a thing has to be. Why I have failed him once again. His throat bellows out the tune of furious dreams. The cold dignity is lost from his face. His brow, weighed down with pride, shocks the air with the filth of his inner universe. That is not to say that he is incapable of love. Of lovingness. Only that his heart has become a distant forest, where grey whispers wilt in a ceaseless dullness. The last thing I see before the dark pull is the fear drawn into every facial feature. A deep draft as lifeblood pours into the bath, into his hands. The candles blow out. Naked and overpowered by dark chaos, feeling the fabric of his coat as he pulls me out of the water, I succumb to the world of the half-dead, as intended.

  There is a phantom severity that even he could not have predicted. Bezalel cradles my cooling body on the floor, weeping over the predicament. He has loved others deeper, but had never known this gentle resolve.