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2008 Consumption Allison McEntire

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

CONSUMPTION

ALLISON MCENTIRE

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Allison McEntire defended on November 30, 2007.

______Sheila Ortiz-Taylor Professor Directing Thesis

______Erin Belieu Committee Member

______Robert Olen Butler Committee Member

______Meegan Kennedy Hanson Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... v

1. CHAPTER ONE ……...... … 1

2. CHAPTER TWO …...... …...... 6

3. CHAPTER THREE ……...... 20

4. CHAPTER FOUR ……...... 25

5. CHAPTER FIVE ……...... 29

6. CHAPTER SIX ……...... 36

7. CHAPTER SEVEN …...... …. 34

8. CHAPTER EIGHT ……...... ………… 39

9. CHAPTER NINE ……...... …. 47

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 55

ABSTRACT

As artist John Aubrey approaches the end of his life at the Pineywoods Resort, a late- Victorian tuberculosis sanatorium, he makes one last grasp for an enduring legacy when he latches onto Salome, a young nurse who believes she is pregnant with the child of God.

CHAPTER ONE

The nurse grunts and jerks my chair against the marble foot of the column and pulls the bell for the lift. A gust of cold air on my face and the iron cage creeps down the shaft on eight wheeled and spinning legs. “I don’t like these electric lights. They‘re unwholesome. All I hear in the night is the buzz and pop.” The mechanism flips and the wire accordion door wheezes open. I smell tea olive and copper on the operator‘s gloves as the silver handle glides past and the floor slides level with the soapy hallway boards. She hefts the back of my chair, turns into the jackknifed wheels, and shoves me. I watch her wipe her forehead in the back wall mirror. “No notices. Third floor, anyone can clear him.” I cough. I shove my fist against my lips. The nurse jumps behind me and covers my mouth and nose with a clean cotton handkerchief. She holds her hand clamped over my face until the fit subsides. Thin pockets of rustbrown red streak my exhaled mucous. I am a ghost ship. These lungs of threadbare burlap are my lacerated sails. *** My newspaper, folded on my bed. “Edison Claims Westinghouse Alternating Current More Deadly than Direct. ” Red headline, and far under the fold, a drawing of a slumped bladder, the massive rotten carcass of a creature of the sea. The nurse shakes the paper open and spreads me over on the bed. She pulls my pants down around my ankles. In the basin on the nightstand the sponge waits, half immersed in tepid water. The nurse paints long, rowing strokes of soapy water down the muscles of my legs. “We didn’t have the artesian well back then, either, or the piping. Had to drag the wash water up from the kitchen, if you can imagine that.” “I well remember a time before indoor plumbing.” I shake the newspaper awake. The carcass is believed to be a specimen of an undiscovered species of an ancient, ink- producing squid. Dark men stand around the slumping bladder with their shirtsleeves rolled up to their elbows, smoking cigarillos and kicking boot points in the sand. A man spreads a net of rope and kelp and painted sandstone anchors before the body and 1

gesticulates, a hand like a club, at the camera. He has no teeth or collar and his hands are blacked away with resin grime and pitch. Another holds the flat nosed leaf of a banana plant in his fist and tries to shield the carcass from the sun. “There’s no call to get nasty, Mr. Aubrey.” Loose hairs collect in the lukewarm water. “De Lome Challenges Congress to Champion Sovereign Nations. Spanish Ambassador Criticizes War Hawks.” De Lome is a distant relative; I have never met him. The cartoon head on the page reminds me of a galleon with a farthingale iron hull, bobbling nose listing always to the right. Spanish accent and the listing movement of his head. The nurse bends over my body with a stethoscope and performs the percussive tapping ritual on my naked chest. She smells of lavender soap and bitters, and there is peppermint oil in her hair. “Today you take your operation.” She makes a record in her book. “I’m not frightened.” She pulls my pants up from my ankles and straps my belt back into place. “Only a child would be frightened.” The nurse closes my door and locks it. I hear the grind and click as the metal hull scrapes against the plug and the key turns over in the latch. *** The squid weighed 500 kilograms when it washed ashore in Tanzania, before women from the village came to cut and cart scraps of meat and gristle away. The botanist Charles Cleary speculates, “this strange fish is either a figure of the native imagination entire, or the most fantastic discovery of this century.” After analyzing samples of the cartilagel remnants, including the sharp, bird-like beak, he expects to expose an elaborate hoax. I kick the newspaper across the bedclothes and fasten the buttons of my shirt. Outside the shouts of croquet and the blunt thwack of pinewood mallets. A rat runs along the edge of the room and darts through the door of my water closet. The cheapest room on the nursing floor, the door doesn’t fit in the door frame. My hand curls over the lip of the enamel chamber pot that the nurse left on the bed beside me, but I am going to stand up and piss in my own flushing toilet. I heave my legs over the side of the bed and sit, grasping the chamber pot and the 2

iron headboard of the bed, my naked feet dangling just above the polished oak boards. I lunge forward, onto my feet, and the chain rattles as the pulley wheel turns and I am standing on my own legs, clutching the iron rail. I feel a rip in the paper sail, hear the guide-rope weight punch a hole through the lower shroud. An upward gust of phlegm knocks the rig against the lookout, where my withered heart hangs like a talisman against the creatures of the deep. A pool of urine collects on the floor between my feet. *** The newspaper lies flush on the floor, the squid floating on a wet circle of running ink. I sit slumped on the spine of the mattress in my shirtwaist, my trousers and cotton drawers folded and stacked on the head of the wardrobe. I hear the peg twist, and the iron key scrapes the peg against the hull. “Go away, this time is promised to me.” The nurse closes the door. I hear the click of the latch. “Very little is promised, Mr. Aubrey.” She brings the cotton underwear and turns her back, stooping to mop up my mess with the soiled newspaper. “ She winds the lamp, and the electric current hums and buzzes in its incandescent shell. “I miss the flickering gas lights. These manufactured lights are too bright.” She kicks open the door of my water closet and carries a silver mug and a sharp silver stylus to the burner that protrudes, like a copper-coiling king snake, above the flushing chamber on the head. I watch through the open door as she runs the sink to fill the mug, clamps a metal cup to the exposed coil under the gas nozzle, and drops a silver instrument in the water. When the water comes to boil, the metal instrument clangs and roils against the lip of the silver cup. The nurse unstraps my belt and pulls my pants down around my ankles. She draws the sponge along the inside of my soiled thighs, but she is a different woman. Her hair is red like the ink of poppies, and smells of shave lotion and something sharp and starchy, like curdling cheese. She says, “I need to change your linens.” I allow myself to be rolled out of the bed and into my wheelchair. She pushes me up against my desk and strips away the bed sheets, fan of falling fabric, veil of grimed and salt-stained cheesecloth. I open my register and review my monthly expenses. I shut the register and re-arrange my inks by viscosity and shade. On the second page of my sketchbook, a man with the lips and craggy jaw of a 3

goat. “Bring me pens,” I say, and the nurse opens my wardrobe and procures my nib box. I give the man a the shrunken, sloughing skin of an ancient, wizened man. His ribcage slumps over, broken, and the skin of his pectoral muscles sag under his chest hair the swollen teats of a wild dog, newly whelped. “The doctor will be here at any minute.” The nurse stirs the boiling water with the silver instrument. “I am not afraid.” She touches my shoulder. She has a prominent overbite and the kind face of a caged rabbit, but her skin is a eggshell clear as inquisition oil paintings of the Madonna. I draw horns curling from the man’s shaggy mane, the protruding legs spread like the legs of a woman. “Doctor has to take your adenoids, Mr. Aubrey. It‘s a common procedure.” The door opens, and the doctor kicks aside the pile of newspaper and soiled linens. He removes his hat and brandishes his bald spot like a horn. The nurse says “Aubrey, Doctor. Adenoid removal.” “Right.” The doctor consults his laboratory book. The nurse walks smart into my water closet and emerges with a small enamel bowl that I have never seen before. It curves in the middle around a u of steel plate. She fits this u against my lower lip, and holds it. She slaps the metal stylus in the doctor’s naked palm and stands next to him with the boiling water on the edge of the desk, on my sketchbook. There is a sharp blade on the end of the metal instrument, something like a palette knife, but far shaper. “Open your mouth.” The nurse strokes my hair. “Right, now be a man Aubrey, this will only hurt a minute.” I open my mouth. He plunges the razor-tipped instrument against the roof of my mouth and makes several quick twists that seem to grind away the root of my nasal cavity. “Right. Now, spit.” Mounds and lumps of red flesh tumble into the enamel bowl. My mouth fills with blood. Blood dribbles down my chin. “Go on and spit, man.” I spit. Bits of the roof of my mouth and a syrup of red blood floats in water shallows at the end of the enamel bowl. The nurse wipes my chin. “Go on and spit again, Aubrey. Good man. Once the bleeding stops, you should bring this man some brandy.” He claps his meaty hand on my back, like the sportsmen, the husbands and brothers of most of my fellow inmates, cuff each other in the dining room and after dinner over cigars. “Good work, old boy. Right.” He 4

makes a mark in his book. The nurse stands beside me with the enamel bowl pressed against my chin until the doctor closes the door. Then she wipes my mouth with a wet cloth. “How about that brandy?” “The doctor must be joking,” the nurse says. “Sit here and watch the hunters coming in, I‘ll ask if you can have some analgesic.” She turns my chair to face the window, and gives me a warm, wet cloth to hold underneath my mouth. “I’m not a child, I can handle a brandy,” I protest, but I’m weak, and the nursing staff is devoted to temperance as a national ideal, so sit and do as I‘m told. The nurse disappears behind the water closet door with the enamel bowl hugged against her body, a sliver of her black dress still visible through the stubborn doorway. If I twist in my chair I can see her body reflected in the mirror on the back wall over the bathing salon. I watch her. She sets the bowl on the cover of the toilet reservoir and reaches underneath her skirt, hiking layers of crinoline and silk up to her waist. She is wears the loose, non- constructive bloomers of a cartoon-page New Woman, and the determined expression of a suffragist in Punch. She yanks the bloomers to her knees, and she is standing over my toilet naked between the waist and knee. She dips her fingers in the enamel bowl, and rubs my blood there between her legs. A gentleman would speak up, but I am an invalid. I hold my tongue and watch the sky.

CHAPTER TWO

The matron orders all patients to dance attendance at the Twelfth Night Ball, mobile or no. She sends the lavender nurse with the grim, loveless mouth to swaddle me in my satin cravat. I have not seen the surgery nurse for many days, but I think of her. The patients sit with their backs to the wallpaper and their dance cards chained to their waists. The few who still dance lay languid on fainting couches, on display for the sporting, social gentleman. I am forced into a corner. I sit, my hat on my knee, underneath an oil painting of the feet and sandals of the broken statue of Ozymandias. A man tells a joke and ripple of braying laughter crashes in a wave and floods the tennis conversation. The women that line the walls look up each time the men shift towards them, each one with the look of a hungry child in her eyes. Their cheeks and lips are blood red. They twist their hair in knots and lanyards that coil around the crowns of their heads like serpents. The women of this place have horns and hooves, and waists the size of swollen throats. There’s a flask of brandy in the doctor’s office, on the shelf beside his formaldehyde-soaked heart. “Mr. Aubrey, do you think there will be war with Spain?” Someone dying girl’s mother wants to include me in the manly conversation. She leans towards me and touches my knee, half-haunch of her enormous rump lifted off the velvet circle of the ballroom chair. Her daughter slumps against the wall, fanning herself, searching the room, desperate and hot. “Your daughter should be in bed. She looks fevered. We all should be in bed.” The woman . “This might be her last Twelfth Night.” She prods her daughter, and the pair limp away. I can see their corset cages through the fabric of their gowns as they walk, whalebone and ironstrap cages struck between one floor and the next. I sit alone for sometime after, waiting for the nurse to come and push me to my room. The ceilings break in vaults and meet at the center in semi-circles like heaving 6

breasts. Each vault tapers out to the edge with a sharp point, like a corset. I am near the ballroom’s grand entrance, and on the panel above my head, a painting of an angel. I lean my head against the wall. There is a crack in the angel’s face. I jerk the chair break, and shove my weight against the pushrims. My wheels bite and claw the carpet. I clatter and I heave. I stumble over the edge of the rug and almost fall forward on the marble floor, but I escape the shadow of the death that surrounds the ballroom and hems the celebrants in like a corset suffocates the waist. The door to the doctor’s office stands wide open, and no one behind the front desk. *** The doctor keeps his tools in the red leather bag he carries with him, but he keeps his heart in a jar on the shelf. I push aside the door and force my way towards the display case. The purple thing presses its face, flesh tender and raw like the liver, skinned of its periodontal sack, against the side of the glass jar. A dog’s heart. Dead worms crowd the pulmonary artery, frozen in fluid and straining in the posture of escape, semaphore ends where the dissection knife sliced. Beside the jar, a long wooden box the length of a pen knife. I open it. Inside, an ivory woman lies on a velvet coffin pillow. A section of her abdomen lies at her feet, leaving her heart and lungs and womb exposed. A curled fetus underneath her liver, the size and shape of a quarter piece of eight. “Mr. Aubrey?” Her voice shakes. She stands next me, over me, her long plain braid hanging over her shoulder like a ladder to her cheek. “I escaped.” She smiles. Her upper jaw bites forward like a beak. “My adenoids have improved.” I inhale once, broad and deep, to demonstrate. She smiles again, then covers her mouth with her hand. “What is your name?.” “You shouldn’t be here, Mr. Aubrey.” She takes the box from my hands. Before she puts it on the shelf, she slides the woman’s stomach over the torso of the model and snaps the missing piece into place. “I saw you in the closet with my blood.” 7

“I don’t know what you mean.” “I saw you painting your underwear.” Her hand snaps back, a limp night flower shriveling in the early morning light. “You’re pregnant. You’re trying to keep it from the matron.” She doesn’t wear a corset. Her waist is like the trunk of a tree, and nearly level with my head. I put my arms around her hips and try to hold her. She crashes back against the examination table. “Please don’t touch me.” “I can help you.” Her eyes avoid my useless legs. “I’m still a man, aren’t I?” She shakes her head. “I can‘t be.” Strands of hair and beads of perspiration fall loose on her forehead and catch the gas light, framing her face with a flickering halo. “I’m just late. Maybe ill.” “Salome, what in God’s name?” The matron, arms straining the sleeves of her black habit like two swollen blood puddings dangling from the butcher’s hook, barges through the door. Her piggish, tiny eyes swelter in their drooping red lids. Even her eyelids are fat, and angry. “The rules are quite clear, the management will have my hat, and you, Mr. Aubrey, how dare you leave the ball without permission!” Salome stammers. She says my name and looks at me, then looks at the matron and stuffs the pelt of her red braid in her mouth. But I am not entirely useless. “I came in looking for the doctor‘s flask, I know he had some brandy somewhere. This nurse caught me trying to climb the shelving.” “Mr. Aubrey…” Salome forgets to cover her mouth with her hand. The matron folds her arms over her massive chest and looks down her nose, over the rubberized perch of her temple-less spectacles, at my shrinking, rebellious body. “You caught me. I won’t lie about it. I’d rather not cover one sin with another.” I hold my hands open and shake out my sleeves at the wrist. “This nurse got here before I could filch a thing.” “Is that so,” the fat woman says, stroking her chin. A crop of black hairs protrude from a mole on her jaw, and she strokes the hairs, without consciousness, tweezing the occasional long bristle between thumb and forefinger and holding it near her nose for 8

examination. The brandy flask, and the formaldehyde heart, rest on a shelf four or five feet above my head. “Salome, run to the dormitory and undress for bed.” She waits for the girl to slip through the swinging door. Then she retrieves me from the display case and heaves her massive breasts against the wicker backing on my chair. “This is the price of your decadent, filthy life.” She pushes me into the lobby and onto the lift. “You’re a broken man, Mr. Aubrey. And for what, a few pictures published in a handful of degenerate publications?” “I don‘t need alcohol to paint.” “Why then, pray tell, were you attempting to steal it?” She stops my chair in the middle of the hallway and waits for my answer. A portrait of Mark Hanna with a pack of hotel pointers waits for my answer. There is a smudge of blue around his chin where the artist shaved a layer of fat from his jaw line. “I need it to stomach the company of invalids.” The matron rams my knees against the doorframe of my room. “I’m going to speak to the doctor about you. You’re not fit to share the air with our patients. Not fit.” She gathers up a sheaf of drawings, satyrs, mostly female, hairy tendrils sprouting from their monstrous nipples, and shakes them in my face. “This,” she says, “is rubbish. Plain trash.” She bangs out of the room and leaves me sitting in my chair, in my dancing jacket, my nibs scattered at my feet like discharged shotgun cartridges. An hour later, she sends the lavender nurse to help me into bed. *** I inherited three things from my goitered Spanish godmother: a crucifix blessed by Pope Pius VIII, the lace christening gown both she and I were baptized in, and a small gold box barnacled by rubies and emeralds, the mother of pearl inlaid fresco on the lid depicting the nativity of Christ. The christening gown and crucifix I sent to my cousin, who will have children and increase. The box I kept against unforeseeable disasters. When I open my eyes the next morning, the first thing I think of is how to get a hold of it. “The bursar is off duty on Sundays,” the nurse says. “Someone has the key to the bank vault. The hotel might catch fire. Bring me to 9

the man.” “You’ll have to wait until banking hours, Mr. Aubrey.” “Damn it, I am not a child.” She bathes me and puts me in the chair by the window. Through the trees as thick as cell bars I watch natural light reflected in phosphorescent puddles of green algae on the lake. A large white bird perches on a rotting limb near the waterline. It stood with its chest forced forward and its wings spread wide and made two long, loud cries like the tongue of a heavy brass bell striking the against its own swing. The nurse clatters over the threshold with the breakfast tray. “Can you see that bird?’ I tap the glass and twist in my chair. “What type of bird is that?” “Whooping crane, Mr. Aubrey.” She ties a napkin under my chin. “Whooping crane. Sounds like whooping cough. I’ll shoot one and have a hat made for you if you find me the man with the safe room key.” “Really, Mr. Aubrey, you are too queer to be borne.” She hands me the knife and the fork, and pours a tall glass of fresh orange juice. “Your will can wait a whole day‘s cycle, you‘re not out of the woods yet.” *** Monday morning, when the door opens, I am waiting on the firm edge of my prescription rubber mattress, and mostly dressed save the dress socks and garters and the tiny cufflinks in the shelf at the top of my wardrobe. The linens nurse fetches my fasteners and helps me into my chair. I refuse to eat until she agrees to help me over the threshold and into the elevator. In the bowels of the hotel, a strong room crouches behind a wire cage, a rough beast of a metal doorway, hard spinning captain‘s wheel to operate the lock. The bursar heaves against the spokes and the mouth of the great steel trap opens. Inside, box after box of valuable belongings. Tags labeled “no next of kin” dangle from key slots and twist against the inrush of air like late the moths of Indian summer. I tell the man my name, hand my passport up spread open on the wooden desk, and he brings a small locked box to the counter, opens it, and spreads the contents out over his newspaper, checking each item aloud against the catalogue. “Weatherall Fountain Pen,” he says, and lays the pen flat and firm on the boards with a clap. 10

“It was my first pen,” I say. I shift my weight from my right to left buttock. The man looks amused. “Shall I ring for the nurse to take you to the facilities?” “That gold box is all I want.” The man holds his hand up. “We have to check the manifest with every opening, it’s hotel policy.” He thumbs through an old sketchbook and makes the record, “Book of pressed flowers.” I sit in my chair while he presents, item by item, a catalogue of the worthless acquisitions that characterize my life. When he comes to the gold box, he tilts it forward as if to display its charms to a prospective buyer. “That aught to fetch a pretty penny,” he says. He traces the outline of the Virgin Mary’s mother-of-pearl halo with the nib-less hind-end of my first fountain pen. “The double layering here? Look Spanish. I can telegraph a man in Chicago who is interested in Inquisition artifacts, have the money for you in a matter of days. A week at the most.” “I stand amazed by the speed of commerce.” “What’s that?” He leans over the desk to have a better look at me. The hairs of his moustache claw at the links in the cage. “Fancy chair, Mr. Aubrey. I wouldn’t recommend a private sale. Those antiquities dealers will eat you alive, confined as you are. Best to just let me handle this for you.” He puts his hand over the baby Jesus. I bang mine on the counter with all the strength that I can muster, and shout like a drunk man swaggering at the end of a crowded bar, my voice crowing in clumps like the mating cough of the whooping crane. “Just give me the God damn box!” “Alright, alright. It’s your funeral.” The man passes the box through a rectangular window in the wire cage just at my eye level. “And the rest of your items?” “Lock them back up.” I wedge the box between my legs and heave against the pushrims. The man says, “You have to wait here for a nurse to come and fetch you. Hotel policy.” I push back again and he springs open a door beneath the desk and ducks through it, grabbing at my front wheel. “I’m sorry, buddy.” He stands behind my wheelchair with his foot wedged under the rudder wheel. “My hands are tied.” My fountain pen rolls down the desk and falls on the other side and shatters. Three hours pass before I am alone in my room with the door locked. 11

The box is Castilian, the work of Franciscan monks. On the underside, in the center, three cut emeralds shoot through the IXOYΣ. If you press the two outer emeralds at the same time and then depress the emerald at the center of the theta, a mechanism springs a wire trap, and the lid opens. A fragment of leather parchment, maybe two thousand years old or older, waits inside, inscribed with the words of the prophet:

ּּ ,ׁ ; , -ׁ

- ,ּ- ׁ- : ,ּ

ּ ,ׁ ּ :ּ ּ -ּׁ ,ּ

- ּ ּ

,ּ , ּ :-- ,ּ ּ

ּּ ,ׁ

ּּ ּ ,ּ ּ-- ,ּׁ

ּ :ּּ ּ--ּ ,ּ ּ ּ

ׁ ּ , ּ ׁ

,ּ- ׁ , ּ- ּ- ,

ּּׁ , :ּ -ּ ּ

I open the leather botanist purse and lift the fragment from the velvet lining with my specimen tweezers. A small, molded bit of leather falls away when the edge of the box scrapes the side of the manuscript. I hold my breath, squint through the convex eye of my folding microscope, and study the ink. The scribal hand shook. The letters slink and twitch like snakes, but in spots they are blunt, determined paths cut through the leather. The leather smells like charred animal fat. The black ink has faded to a blood-rust brown, impossible to forge. I push and pull my way to the wardrobe where I hide my nibs and brushes and oil crayons in a tea box 12

under layers of laundered shirts. On the face of the fragment I read the struggle of a man against material. Each time the scribe stopped to sharpen his quill the labor is recorded there in ink on leather parchment. My manufactured nibs are too precise; they stain in manufactured patterns, like the drips of grease that fall through the grid on the coal trap in an icebox. I close the tea box and look for other options. In the hall a stuffed pheasant watches the nurses come and go from atop a Doric column five feet high. I throw my weight against the pushrims and drag myself to the door and rattle the knob. It’s locked. An hour later the key turns over in the bolt and the door opens. “They say it’s time for you to take the air.” I jerk awake. Salome stands over me, twisting the end of her long braid. “I’ve come to take you down for percussion and X- ray.” The front of her dress is as flat as the face of a mirror. “Bring me a feather from the stuffed bird in the hallway.” “The matron won‘t allow it. It‘s time for your percussion.” The parchment lies pressed flat under the glass at the base of my microscope, the molded and foxed edges dampened down to smooth, triangular folds. “It’s just outside the door, no one will know it. The one with the gaudy tail feathers and the nasty black eye. Go and pluck a feather for me.” Salome doesn’t speak. She only stands stooped over me, protecting her body, worrying at her braid. “I need one of those feathers.” “That’s Mr. Hanna’s bird, ain’t it?” Her accent sits at the back of her throat like a handful of wet clay. “No one will notice.” She puts the end of the braid in her mouth and sucks on her own hair. When she speaks, she holds the spit wet end against her chest and twists the tip to a tight paintbrush point. “What do you want with it?” “I‘m trying to help you. If you won‘t do it for me, I‘ll do it myself.” I spin against the desk and shove myself towards the doorway. She steps back as I roll towards her, and when she reaches the threshold she trips over the raised pine wood accent and falls, 13

flailing into the hall, knocking the stuffed pheasant to the floor. She is still pleading, “Please get back, go back into your room,” as she struggles to her feet. My wheel blunts against the wooden block. I reach out and pull myself up on the door frame. Once on my feet, shaking and cursing under my shallow breath, she screams and crawls through the mess of molted feathers and clumps towards the banister and flies down the stairs. I yank the chair break and press my feet to the wooden floorboards. Bubbles of mucous and flakes of skin catch in my esophagus. I heave the weight of my body against the wall and slide myself around my doorway casing and inch out into the hallway. The pheasant stares at me from the floor, his black marble eye spinning in its socket. At the other end of the hall I hear the click and ting of the lift. The floor is littered with broken, dusty feathers, the slough off the taxidermied hind quarters. I stoop and shove one in my pocket and press my back against the wall. I am standing still standing when the matron swings her arm to cuff my ear. *** Hours later, after the grind of harsh, grinding remonstrance of the matron has turned like a key against the plug in the lock, I sit at the desk with my parchment and pen knife, and whittle the stump of the feather down to a primitive nib. I cut the cartilage at the follicle where the plume pulled loose from the body, and strip away the short bristles that scrape and chaff my hand. A sloping hack against the natural tip and the sharp, plastic edge of cartilage emerges. I slice a scoop from the barrel and then knick in on both sides, shaping the head, and press the edge against the table to lever the knife into the tip, and cut a smooth, long slit. The guillotine descends. For some time I sit, slicing layer after layer off the tip in curling slivers of cell matter as thin and brittle as papyrus. The nurse brings my tea. The platter clatters against her tree-trunk waist. “Why don’t you wear a corset, like the patients? Aren‘t firmly-girded loins the secret of good health?” “Mr. Aubrey, Matron has asked me to inform you that there will be an investigation as to your recent behavior, and to remind you that drunks find no refuge in a temple of health and healing.” “Is that what she’s advertising now?” Tea, Piney Woods tea the rich rust brown of an empty fruit tin half hidden in a 14

wash of clay, is the same shade of brown I need to make my changes to the document. I take the lid off the pot and dip my quill into the warm liquid, then make a small dot on one of the flakes of leather that fell away from the fragment. It fades to a coal-scuttle grey as the water evaporates. “I’ll need to reduce this.” I push open the rolling top screen on my writing desk and search for a glass bottle with a broad, flat bottom, a wireframe holder still clinging to its shaped waist. “You’ll do nothing of the sort.” She snatches the bottle from my hand. “To all things one purpose, and one purpose alone to all things. You’ll not go about turning tea into liquor on my watch.” She shoves the bottle into the broad marsupial mouth on the hood of her apron and takes my tray, tea and toast together, to the meal cart in the hallway. I need something with an orange tint to its rust. Something of a shade that tastes bitter and smells of pomegranates and walnuts. The matron opens my door, a crown of brown-skinned men in white collars staring into my room over her shoulder, and catches me at my desk opening a vein. “Grab him, restrain him!” She shakes her finger like a wiregrass whip in the air and the men push through the doorway, clamping straps to my appendages. They bind my head to the back of the chair. I kick and strain and the pull the bracings tighter. “In Jesus’ name, someone bring me some gauze.” The matron claps a handful of cotton into the wood and wraps a bandage over my arm. She gestures for the men to move out of her way, and go about their business. One hauls my rubber mattress from the box springs of my bed. “Now do you recognize your piteous, desperate condition and repent? Suicide, the cowards path, the path of the weak and dispirited.” I can’t turn my neck. My eyes roll towards my blind spot and I throw my voice at my left shoulder. “I have spirits. In the wardrobe.” I talk with my bottom jaw. She points and two mean open the wardrobe, pull my shirts and underclothing, my tea box of oil crayons, and spread them in piles on the floor. The matron’s eyes fall on the nativity box. She snatches it up, rattles it, then holds it against my cheek. “How do you open this?” Her lip curls at the corner in a demonic, canine sneer. Nothing would please her more than to find a flask in my nativity box. I don’t want to disappoint her. 15

“I’ll need my hands.” “Your direction will suffice.” She works the mechanism and the lids springs open. “What is this?” She licks her finger and fishes against the lining of the box, and comes up with a small flake of leather, the molded hide of an animal dead these two thousands years. She tastes it. “What is this substance, Mr. Aubrey? It tastes like wormwood.” I keep my eyes cut away from the microscope and the parchment underneath. “Flakes of saltpeter, for making fuses.” “Aubrey, I am not a child to be lied to and duped.” She cribs a box of flexibles from the incidental box on my writing desk drops them in my lap. “Matches and fuses serve two different purposes.” The matron stands over me, places her hands on either armrest on my chair, and speaks slowly and clearly as she snarls in my face. Her breath is hot like August. “I know you’re producing whisky in here and I mean to find out how.” She releases my bleeding wrist, handkerchief soaked through and stuck to the skin. I think I laughed, I have a sick laugh, because at that moment she struck me. Then she straightened her body, massive black nun with an oak knot for a stomach, and walked away, my nativity box in her hand. I open a nearby journal and dipped the quill into my ink, the bloody cloth still hanging, partially peeled back, from the wound in my wrist.

The Hebrew word , ha-almah, means young woman. I write in my journal with my blood seeping into fissures in the cartilage. I try as much as possible to let my hand shake like the scribe’s. Once I’m done, I dip the pen again and make a mark against the connecting it to the . I smudge the to and add a forked tongue to the .

The young woman becomes a virgin, , bethulah. I practice the operation over and over, trying to mimic the infirm streak in the scribal hand. Mulled blood on old leather is as rust brown as copper shavings. To steal my courage for the final act, I take a sip of analgesic from the green bottle on the window seal. I redress the wound with the stained gauze and bandage. I lift the specimen guard on the microscope tray and the black circle on the concave side of the lens rolls away.

Behold. The virgin will conceive, bear a son, and name him Shiloh. The place of peace. For eighteen hundred years, Christian scholars have argued that Isaiah 7:14 implies that the young woman is a virgin, even if it doesn‘t use the literal word. Before me now lies the only ancient copy of the scripture that carries the Christian interpretation of the prophecy in the text. Through my window, I watch the sun setting behind the wall of trees that line the far edge of the lake. A girl with a long red braid kneels next to the water’s edge, and soaks up moisture in a fist of plucked cotton. She drags the mop across her forehead, behind her neck and under her braid. She hands the cotton to the woman who crouches beside her, rinsing croquet pegs in the water. The woman pushes Salome’s mud- and sweat-stained hand away. *** When they push me down to breakfast I carry the parchment against my chest, pressed between the pages of my drawing journal. I eat my spoonfuls of yogurt and ask for more honey on my bread. I drink their awful chicory coffee and smile and wave to the men on their way to the gate to make a hunting party. I behave. When the Matron blows the whistle and the maids come for the plates, a slip in line with the young women to sit on the public terrace to take the morning air. The Matron tries to stop me. She charges down through the hall screaming, “Not that one, he’ll contaminate the lot,” but the doctor is there with his flagrant bald spot and glad-handiness and he shoves the Matron’s yalps aside. “This man is making an effort. I suggest you let him make it.” The scullery women lean against the lattice rail and watch commerce walking past them on the street, in and out of shops and through the mud that gathers in whelping pools at the center. I throw myself spinning down the ramp and wheel headlong towards the muddy midbank towards the office of the Thomasville Times-Enterprise. After I stop for the third time to rest, my lungs twisting in a gale force wind of dust-thick respiration, salty perspiration, and the effulgent fumes of horse offal, Captain Triplet opens the second story window and yells down to ask if I want some assistance. His 6th Calvary cap and his stuffed monkey mustaches perch on his head like holiday decorations. “God 17

in heaven, man,” he barks. “Can’t you wait for the evening times to come across the channel?” “I have a story for you, story of the century.” I hack against the back of my sleeve, and he offers me his napkin. I take the cloth, smudged with black ink, and hack against the cloth. There are flecks of blood in my sputum. “What happened to your arm?” I tug at my cuffs and hand the napkin back, tapping my breast pocket. “I have in my possession and amazing document, absolutely amazing. It’s going to blow the cover off a thousand years of Christian scholarship. I only need to have some photographic plates made, and sent to University, to confirm its authenticity.” The captain put his feet on his desk and lit a pipe. He sucked at the end, then blew a ring of smoke that floated above his Calvary cap like a halo. “I was part of the escort guard for Jefferson Davis, you know. They say he was captured wearing a dress, well I say malarkey. I saw the man surrender with my own beady eyes. People will believe anything they read in the papers.” “I’m not asking for any money.” I put my hand into my coat and fished around for the notebook, spread the notebook open on his workbench. “This is an authentic prophecy of the one true Christ. I found it in a jewelry box I inherited from my godmother. I would have brought it to you in the box except the matron confiscated it last evening.” I cracked the journal open and the Captain leaned forward against the desk. “Jewelry box, eh? What kind of language is that?” “Hebrew.” “And you can read it? I didn’t know they let Jews into the Woods.” I laugh. I have a sick laugh. I clear my throat and say, “the thing is, no one knows of its existence. It’s been in my possession for years, only I didn’t know how to open the box until very recently. It works on a trip mechanism.” “How’d you figure it out?” The Captain’s chin had a three inch scar hacked through the center like the drawing point on a quill. “Boredom.” The Captain laughed. “Come now, my man. All those pale wisps of fading silk not enough to capture your imagination?” 18

“I’ll need photographic plates, and a telegraph to New York City. And then I’ll need arrangements made to send the plates by train.” The Captain nods. He strokes his moustache and taps the pipe out in the coal trap. Then he takes the soiled napkin and tosses it on the fire. “Consumption is a woman’s disease,” he says. “An effeminate scourge. Jefferson Davis died of malaria. Like a man.” I reach into my breast pocket and lay four dollars on the table. “I want the telegraph to read as follows.” The Captain picks up his fountain pen.

CHAPTER THREE

The body creaks and groans. In the night it is easy to mistake for some large lumbering sea creature rising terrible from the deep. But come the dawn it sees itself reflected in the water closet, a deflated bladder of a body that lays dying, struggling for air, all the ink bleeding into the sheets. Morning comes, and a telegram with breakfast. The nurse wraps me in flannel blankets and pushes me out onto the terrace, where men without physical complaint kick their boots against the railing to knock off walking layers of caked-on Georgia mud. She slices open the envelope and drops the telegram on the tray, then bends to place my reading glasses on the slope in the bridge of my nose. I let her do it. Aubrey. Stop. Where under heaven did you come across this document. Stop. I don’t believe your story for a second. Stop. Will run a diagram of the plate 3 in next number. Stop. Doubt anyone will take notice. Stop. We can’t offer you money. Stop. Maybe you’ll be famous yet. + The date stamped on the face of the message is February 12, 1898. A waiter brings rolls and coffee and the prescribed dish of yogurt. At every sanatoria in America, they’re shoving yogurt down your throat, phlegmatic jiggling mass, small wonder no one can eat. I ask for the New York Journal and he brings the Post. I ask again for the Journal and he returns with my paper and another dish, this time yogurt with stewed strawberries, streaks of red shot through the gelatinous white. I motion for him to bring the bowl close to my face and I spit in it. “See any difference?” The man winces. He has the clear lungs of a Kentucky stallion in his third year, and the leering countenance of a syphilitic Spanish pirate in a yellow page cartoon. He takes the dish away. News of Spain, news of Cuba, and then below the fold a hand-drawn illustration posed beside a dark reproduction of plate 3, the word bethulah, snaking lines of ancient handwriting indistinguishable from my own. The headline, “Ancient Document Might 20

Prove Jews Wrong About Messiah” cuts across three columns, and beneath my invitation, my challenge to the community of scholars: “John Aubrey, Invalid, Invites Public Scrutiny and Debate.” The paper lists my post address and hotel box and room number. On the far side of the lake a shotgun cracks out its blast of powder and scattershot. A scattered bevy of quail fling their broken bodies against the sky. I struggle free of my flannel swaddling and fold the paper around the story columns and frame the article in my lap. Once beyond the bump of timber that marks off the terrace from the open parlor, I sail over the polished boards towards the nurse’s dormitory hall, and park myself against a Doric column, nudging the wheel against the broad toe of the elephant-foot planter, and wait for Salome to pass through the black door. A sign nailed to the center beam warns the nurses to “Seek the truth and serve humanity.” I trace my finger over the newsprint and smudge the line where my hand, shaking, restored the young woman to the temple of virginity. Several severe birds in black habits pass through the door, some offering passing glances of concern before hurrying to their assigned task. I pretend to doze, as though ordered to doze, and cover the newspaper with my hand. When Salome shoots through the door, I have to grab her by the arm to stop her. “Wait, I have to show you something.” “Mr. Aubrey?” I hold up the newspaper and point at the smudged ink. “Behold a virgin shall conceive.” I punch at the newsprint, gesticulating mad like an octopus in a lobster trap. “A virgin!” Salome covers her mouth with her hand. “Please don’t touch me.” I let her loose and press the paper to the flat front of her dress. “I have to see you.” Salome glances up the hall and then down it, her braid tangled and matted, loose strands sticking out of each hashed fissure in the weaving. She hasn’t slept, there are purple half-mooned bruises deep underneath her eyes. She looks at the black doorway, the words of Florence Nightingale, fresh and greasy damp with iron-black. “Not here. Go to your room. I’ll come later.” “Swear to it.” 21

She thrusts the paper into my lap. “I promise, just go.” She runs down the hall towards the commissary door. A loud clatter of metal on the other side when she falls through it. She never looks back. I wheel myself to the lift, hands grinding at the spokes, breath catching in the back of my throat. *** In my room, with the door closed, I notice the black marble of blood hardened like a button to my vest. I peel the button from the clinging fiber and press it between the pages of my journal, half the book ahead of the ancient document. The plastic skin bursts and spreads like a thumbprint onto the paper when I press the cover closed. Someone knocks, then twists the handle. It is Salome, with a bellows and a breathing apperatus. I twist my body towards the door. “Doctor said you had to have this on your mouth.” She closes the door and locks it from the inside, a circle of keys dangling from a chain that swings down to her knee and bangs my bed frame while spreads the pieces of the apparatus on the bed. “Matron doesn’t know I’m here.” Her eyes are gray. Gray-eyed Salome. I smile, and she smiles, and then she covers her mouth. “Will I be able to talk?” She nods. “Put it on me, quick.” She comes forward with the metal cup, a long tube protruding from the mouthpiece, a rubber stopper at the nose, pulls the elastic band over the crown of my head, behind my ears, and fits the apparatus to my face. I hold the rustling newspaper leaf against the dangling rubber tube. “You could be this virgin.” She fits the end of the tube over the nozzle of the bellows and expands the accordion fan. She does not look at the newspaper. I point to the smudged representation of my forgery and then underline the characters with the nail bit of my index finger. “Your child could be the place of peace that ends the war of nations.” She pumps the bellows up and down, gale force gusts of wind against my tattered and torn rigging. I cough and spit against the metal cup. She claps me on the back and pumps faster, harder, ignoring the paper in my hands. A few further practiced whacks on my ribcage and the coughing subsides. A rush of air through my torso, my chest expands like the chest of a man seated high on a hunting wagon riding out after a pack of hounds, 22

and then I collapse and I’m drowning against the high wicker back of my wheelchair and she is clutching me, shaking me, slapping my face. She snaps the metal bit away and blood spurts out on the newspaper page in my lap. She takes the paper and mops at the red stains with a clean white cloth. When she hands it back she says, “I can’t read this.” “It’s in Hebrew. It’s Isaiah. Listen.” I translate, I recite, I’m not sure which, and perhaps it’s impossible for me to separate these actions. “Before the child learns to refuse evil, and choose good, I will forsake the land whose two kings you fear.” I watch her face, the movement of her gray eyes. She wipes my mouth with the sanitary napkin. “I don’t know what that means.” I rest my head on the back of the chair and jab the paper sheet, punch the hand- drawn illustration. “You know the story of the nativity, don’t you? Who are these two kings?” Salome shrugs, and takes the metal mouthpiece into the water closet to flush the blood away. “I’ll tell you who,” I shout, as loud as my torn lungs can manage, at the back of her dress bent over the toilet bowl. “They’re Queen Regent Maria Christina and Alfonso XIII of Spain, that’s who.” When she comes back into the room, she says, “that’s a queen and a king.” Her keys clatter against my pushrims. She wipes my forehead with a wet cloth. “You’re feverish, and slick with sweat. You should stay in bed like Matron wants. Let the businessmen worry about the war.” “In ancient times,” she starts to undress me, her thin fingers dragging out the buttons on my vest, “the queens called themselves kings and princes. Judith in Judges, even Queen Elizabeth.” She opens the collar of my shirt and runs the cloth over my Adam’s apple and down my neck. “It’s the office, the prophecy refers to the office.” “Hush now, Mr. Aubrey. It’s the delirium tremens, they’re giving you delusions.” “Damn it, I am not making this up.” I crush the paper in my fist. I shake my fist at Salome and the fetus of our Lord. “This is happening right now. Prophecy is happening right now. Why won’t you stand in awe of it?” She sat down on the edge of my bed, shoulders slumped, hands on the curve of 23

her belly. “I didn’t ask for this,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to know.” “No one has to know.” She hid her face with the stained cloth. Her shoulders shake. She is crying. On the nightstand, a shallow bowl of tepid water. I push over the border that separates the tile of the closet from the main bedroom boards, and run the faucet. A stream of running water flows through my hands. Salome watches me from the edge of my rubber bed. I reach up for the enamel bowl, I lean with my hand on the chair-rest and strain to stand; she walks into the water closet and pulls the door shut on the sickroom. She pulls down the enamel bowl and fills it and thrusts it towards me. “This is living water from the belly of the earth.” I take the handkerchief from her grasp and dip it in the bowl, which she holds next to her abdomen like a shield. “Fifty years ago I would have had to hire someone to carry me down to the creek.” I clean her face, wipe the smudge of newsprint from her wet cheeks. “Let me do it.” She steels her hand. I dip my fingers in the bowl and draw a line of fresh, wholesome water from her forehead to the tip of her nose, then across her cheeks over the purple-black bruises. “In the name of the Father,” I whisper. “Amen.” She pours the fount out in the flushing bowl and pulls the chain. She puts the enamel bowl back in the cabinet and leaves the newspaper on my lap. “I have to go back to the dormitory, they‘ll notice.” She gathers the parts of the apparatus, the tube and bellows and metal mouthpiece, in her arms. I watch from my chair as she turns the lock in the door. She leaves the newspaper folded, lead headline side facing up, near my pillow. A caricature of Ambassador de Lome, oiled whiskers combed to a satanic point at his chin, stares up at me from my lap. He looks like my mother towards the end of her life, both rapacious and bored, the famished look of people whose lives are set too close together. The black block headline announces, “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History” across all columns. Underneath, the text of a letter written in December to General Weyler. The reproduced signature is the sloping, weak hand of a dying animal, and his L’s look just like mine.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Mr. Aubrey, I will scour this room from port to aft; if there is but one molecule of sour mash, I’ll find it.” The Matron sends the breakfast tray into the hallway and stands over my desk, turning over my papers with a tweezing fork. “I’ll start with that journal of yours, pass it up.” The orderlies file in to turn my mattress, move my bed frame and check the floorboards for trap doors and hidden compartments. The men work swiftly on their knees, muttering under their breath about the division of labor, and turn up nothing save an old comb with the hair of a dead woman still tangled through the teeth, and the shavings of feather cartilage I carved away from the nib. The document is safe in my deposit box downstairs. “Where is my tobacco box?” I hand over the journal and she turns it upside down, fanning out the pages like the accordion leather folds of the bellows or the sliding metal door of the lift. “We don’t allow the use of tobacco,” she says. She puts her thumb on the spine of the journal and shoves the open page in my face. “What is the meaning of this?” Over and over, in shaking Hebrew, I practiced turning almah to virgin with my quill. “It means health, it’s a meditation. In the Lancet, latest number, the article on the benefits of focusing on a state of health.” I stammer and blush. “Did the Doctor approve this therapy? No?” She turns the page. “I’m not surprised. You will cease engaging in unapproved therapies or I will see you forced to leave this institution.” She hands my journal to the nurse who stands at her elbow and waits her instruction. “I want to have a closer look at that. Put it on my desk.” This is too much. “Give it back.” I grab the nurse’s arm as she turns to leave the room. The orderlies pause in their lumbering inspection of my furniture. The matron glares down at me like a gargoyle on the capstone of an ancient cathedral, five hundred years of judgment chipped blunt across her brow. “I’m a customer here, not a convict. 25

Give me my sketchbook and leave my room.” The nurse moves like she means to do it, but the Matron steals her hand. “You, Mr. Aubrey,” she says, staring down at me over her considerable, black-cloaked bosom, “are an invalid. Put this man on the bed.” The Negro men rustle me up from my wicker chair and spread me over the sheets. “Strap him down.” I struggle against the leather restraints they affix at the four posts, but she is on me, a daemon woman gloating over the decaying body of her lover. She pushes back my shirt, exposes my breast, and orders the strongmen from the room. She sends a nurse for warm cloths and analgesic. While she waits she performs the percussive tapping ritual with her head pressed against my chest. “You are a weak man,” she says. “Degenerate of mind and body.” The nurse returns with a bowl, steam rising in the incandescent electric light. “I mean to cure you of your sin.“ She takes the glass bottle from the nurse, dark sea of slime distorted in the green beveled-cut stamp of manufacture, and dampens a cloth at the mouth of it. She spreads the laudanum-soaked cloth over my chest. The fumes sting my eyes, and I fight to hold my breath, but the rattling ragged sails rip with the effort and I burst open, inhaling, coughing, drowning. “Open your mouth.” She pinches my nose, and forces my mouth open. She holds my tongue flat against my lower jaw with a steel instrument and counts twelve measured drops out as they fall to stain my tongue. “I want this repeated every twelve hours,” she says. She thrusts the bottle at the nurse, who pockets it. “No one is allowed in this room without my knowledge.” The key turns over in the lock. The surface of the sea is on fire, and I heft and plunge three feet below the waterline along the side of the armored Spanish galleon. My massive, marble eye peers through the watertight cover on the loaded cannon port. On the other side, a man holds a fuse and a handful of saltpetre. I plume and pull through the water, and let the ship skim several lengths ahead. She is leaking analgesic at the rudder, staining the deep black with foul clouds of hazy green. I hold the hinge and stern post in the mighty crush of my eight arms and cover the chaser port with my mouth, biting the flapping metal cover, ripping at it with my beak. I draw in broad, rushing breaths of saltwater, and my rubber chest expands. The galleon pitches and buckles, the hull groans and boards snap. Men plunge 26

from the rigging into the dark water around me, and drown in the laudanum spray. One washes towards me, his body keelhauled to the mainmast and pockmarked with barnacles, and his face is the face of Mark Hanna and he has my pen knife in his hand. He slashes at my puckered tentacles and the galleon slips away. “Mr. Aubrey, what can this mean?” Salome strips away the wet, suffocating chest cloth and mops the salt sweat from my forehead. “Cut me loose.” I pitch against the bed straps. Salome hooks a lamp to my bedpost, the whale oil burning black along the tallow wick. “My knife, in the desk. Hurry.” Salome brings the knife across and saws against the thick leather, buzzing and popping. Once my hands are free she maketh me to lie down in green pastures. She rubbeth the laudanum handkerchief on the burn marks at my wrists. “I love you.” She stuffs the rag into my mouth and pinches my nose shut. “Verily I say to you, you can love only yourself.” She floats away on clumps of bracken, kelp dripping from her hair. There is an explosion in the night. Glass shatters, and a fire licks the face of the newspaper office. A woman screams, “War! Oh man of war!” I pull my body to the window and peer down at the street. The troops are massing, forming rank ten soldiers deep that stretches from the grand entrance of the hotel to the Plant system depot car shed. The matron stands on the platform at the train depot with a battle flag and a bottle. She smashes the bottle against the standard rod and green gas fills the therapeutic pine- sap air. The soldiers shout, “Blood and fire!” and they are women, struggling, skeletal every one of them, line after line of sunken faces as pallid and shadowy as the moon. Each one, confined to a wheelchair, drops of dried blood splattered across the front of every dress. *** The door opens, and it is morning, and I am still strapped fast to the bed. The nurse approaches with the green bottle and soaks a clean rag at the mouth of it. “That may as well be a burial shroud,” I say, and she pinches closed my nose. “Is it true that you’re a don of Spain?” she whispers, looking over her shoulder. 27

“Matron says you’re to be questioned by the national police. For the war effort.” “What war?” There’s no such thing as a national police. I fight against the restraints, but for nothing. She loosens the leather straps. She whispers, “An American ship exploded in Cuba, the news came by wire last night.” She looks over her shoulder at the door, again, to check that it‘s still closed. “Did you have anything to do with it?” I can’t wheel my chair five feet from this institution without my own body turning against me. I laugh. I laugh so hard, the laugh turns sick and rots, and I start to cry. “He’s mad.” I hear her shouting in the hallway. “He’s finally gone totally insane.” The matron stomps over the threshold and she is at me with the soaked cloth, her fat hand clapped over my mouth and eyes, the fabric poisoning my tongue, my eyelashes, stinging the red rims of my nostrils. “Breath!” she screams, and slaps my face. I lie still, with my burial mask upon me. After a forced, protracted silence she peels the cloth back from my face. “Before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land whose two kings thou hast a horror of shall be forsaken.” “If you mean to say something, say it plain.” She boxes my ear and slaps my face. “The seed of the Lord has been planted, and I am his prophet, John the Baptist. The millennial war is upon us. May God have mercy on your soul.” I brace for the blow and she releases my ear. She tosses the laudanum rag in my basin. She lights a match from my book of flexies and tosses the whole lot on the rag. The wet rag smolders and sparks at the dry edges, catches. The flame eats away the cotton and the room fill with a poisonous, gas-cloud haze. She locks me in from the outside, as always. The peg grins against the hull and the lock clicks into place. I sleep and dream of a wave of warships cresting over the Spanish main, the child of God rising from the ocean with the star of David on his head. When I awake, the basin has been taken, and the leather straps are missing. Salome sits beside my bed with her hand hiding the sharp beak of her mouth.

CHAPTER FIVE

“My mother is coming.” I prop myself on my elbows and she rearranges the pillows to support my back. The window is drawn open on a crisp morning, and the rip that comes with any sudden movement is absent from my lungs. There is a crust of saliva at the corner of my mouth, and Salome wipes it away with her thumb. “I think I‘m cured.” I draw in a deep, redeeming breath. I breathe in sunlight, warm hot air of caustic particles, and for once my lungs hold every cubic inch. Salome rubs her lower abdomen, the hand skating back and forth. She bites down nail at the end of her index finger and a dark split line shoots to the quick. “What a I going to tell her?” The black shift they dress her in has just begun to strain at the lower part of her waist. “You’re going to have to steal a larger dress soon.” “I’m supposed to tell Matron that you’re wake.” She stands and tugs at her skirt, shifting the fabric, and the extra flesh disappears. “She wants you to confess.” She grabs up my hand and squeezes it. I cover her hand with my own. “To what?” “I can’t watch you like that again, crying in your sleep. She’s trying to break you.” “I won’t let her.” “What am I going to say to my mother?” “Tell her that you’re carrying the child of Man.” The Matron and her attendant nurse appear at my bedside some fifteen minutes later. The attendant carries a tray with a thermometer, a stack of folded white clothes, and a small green bottle to my bedside. The matron moves the nurse’s chair aside and props on boot on the copper arch that bends beneath the legs. “And how do are we feeling this morning, Mr. Aubrey?” 29

“Never better. I think I might enjoy a constitutional, breathe in that pine air.” I pound my chest like a decorated sea captain. “Truly, Madame, you are the fountain of healing.” “Miriam, dose the rag.” The matron takes the opium-soaked cloth from the girl and holds it under my nose. The green fumes sting my eyes, and I struggle to force her hand away from my face. “Please, no more. Take that bottle away.” The Matron hands the cloth to the attendant. “You have seen the error of your ways?” I grab the Matron’s hand in mine, a supplicant, and prostrate myself before her mighty bosom, her heaving will. “I confess! I was decadent, degenerate. I was a weak and broken man!” “And you repudiate the fermented wine of Baal? You cast your wicked vice away?” “Yes!” I am sobbing against her fist now, really working up a lather. My lungs feel stronger than they have felt in years. “Please, don’t give me any more!” The matron shoves me back against the bed frame, and takes the thermometer from the tray. “Miriam, leave now, I must check Mr. Aubrey‘s temperature.” “Just take that vile bottle!” Miriam locks the door, and the matron pulls my pants to my ankles and pushes me on my side. I watch her massive black-swathed body bend over mine in the water closet mirror, the thermometer a clear glass finger, tongue of mercury at the tip. I close my eyes. I fight for nothing. *** The lawn of the afternoon is strewn with flag-colored paper petals. The nurse pushes me to the foot of the old oak tree and brakes me on a tree root. The shadow of the trunk falls over my lap and in my eyes. At the edge of the lake, a slapped-together wooden pavilion bleeds pine sap and boat resin. The matron stands at the center of the stage with a riding crop in her hand, counting beats. I shift my weight from the right buttock to the left and squirm against the wicker broad back of my chair. My arms itch, and I pick at my cuticles like Salome. Between the pavilion and my oak tree, a long 30

banquet table, Senator Mark Hanna in the corpulent, overabundant flesh, his retinue of confidence men and admirers clapped tight together on rustic split wood stools and dugout benches. Each one wears the black armband of a mourning business acquaintance. A woman with black-dyed ostrich feathers in her hair rubs her face into the Senator’s collar like a preening, primping budgie. Salome stands at the end of the line of habited, bloomer-wearing nurses on the platform, holding a mop in second-bayonet, the handle butted up against her stomach, the rag strings dangling in the wind. The matron shouts “third position” and the nurses thrust their rag mops forward to scrub Spanish villainy from the face of the earth. “Advance!” Each girl steps forward six measured paces, then spins the handle against her forearm and throws her weapon in the air. After the clatter and scramble to retrieve them, the girls fall into “At-Ease” with the wooden butts pressed into the toe of their right boot, the mop head firm in hand and held out from the body at the right. The congregation of pallid women in wicker chairs and on satin pillows claps, a bare rustle of birds rising out of the wiregrass, while Hanna raises his wine glass and a forkful of meat to the women on the stage. “Huzzah for our brave soldiers,” he shouts, and all the men, myself included, shout huzzah for the mixed collection of local drilling squads and weekend army hobbyists in club uniforms that will fight the approaching war. These militia men clap their feet together, throw their shoulders back, and perform their mixed salutes. From some high window above the lawn a confined man shouts, “Give ’em hell, Hanna!” The woman plucks a feather from her hair and tickles the excess flesh that bulges at Hanna’s collar. He plucks the feather from her hand and sets it spinning in the early spring wind. The matron dismisses the girls and they disperse through the crowd, their mock- musket mops slung over their shoulders. Some stand with their hands in their pockets and their pelvises thrust forward, like men. Salome slips to a seat beside the woman who hangs on the senator. The woman clutches the girl to her bosom and makes loud protests of motherly devotion, lost to me in the chattering wave of patients and nurses and sportsmen and soldiers. The matron claps her hand and shouts, “Attention! Achtung!” and clears her throat until everyone quiets. Then we all stand and sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and even I stand, leaning as I might against the trunk of the immense oak, supporting 31

myself on the back of the wheelchair. “My girls will now pass among you with pails, in which we ask you to deposit generously for the Cuban children orphaned by Spain’s ruthless decimation of the brave democratic rebels,” the matron shouts. She holds her arms out to the crowd like winged Nike in the palm of Athena, and her tremendous bosom trembles with patriotic fervor. “The motto of the Salvation Army is ’Blood and Fire’ and no better time to apply it than when in the face of such wicked and satanic force of men.” A young nurse with her hair in tight pin curls approaches with her pail thrust towards me, rattling the coin in the bottom. “Give a good gold dollar to crush the Spanish nobility?” What I wouldn’t give for a good gold piece of eight. I fold open my chequebook and drop a marker in the bucket. After refreshments and a lecture on the constitutional basis for the doctrine of manifest destiny from Captain Triplet, Salome and her mother and Mark Hanna come to my tree. Hanna is larger than I imagined, if such a thing were possible, and has grown even more corpulent since he sat for the painting that hangs in the hallway on my floor. Salome’s mother has the bee-stung mouth of a soap powder advertising angel, and her teeth are white pearls in perfect order. Her eyes blaze on and off like a demonstration of the combustible engine at the world’s fair. “So this is the man who owns the only correctly-worded Christian prophecy,” Hanna says. He holds his hand out to me, and I shake it, thrusting my weight from aft to port and rocking into the wind. “I would like to see that.” “Mama, Mr. Hanna, please meet my patient, Mr. Aubrey.” “Mrs. Barclay.” The be-feathered, fire-eyed woman holds her gloved hand out for me to kiss. “I don’t suppose we can convince you to dine in the tower with us tonight, Mr. Aubrey. I can guarantee the conversation will be poor.” His men mill about the tables shaking hands with the sporting types and mothers. The cast glances at the girls in wheelchairs and pass merry winks when they can get away with it. “I’ve just received a new canister from Edison, and I’ll screen it in the drawing room over brandy and cigars.” “Mr. Aubrey is allowed to drink, Mr. Hanna.” 32

“Why the devil not? Say Aubrey, you’re not one of these temperance nutters, are you?” He holds out his hand and I have to let go of the chair back to shake it. I am standing in the presence of the great political genius. “I would be honored to join you for dinner, Mr. Hanna.” “Marcus, please.” He shakes my hand and clasps my elbow at the same time, pulling me into his circle. “Bring that ancient scroll. The papers did say all were invited to inspect it. Not that I’m a scholar, but I would like my fair chance, same as any man. The written word of God, and all.” He turns me loose and a flail about for the back of the chair but I keep my balance. My lungs hold, like new rigging. Salome smiles, and forgets about her overbite. Her mother holds her daughter’s hand, and smoothes the strings down in her braid. “We will expect you at seven, then. Dress is formal of course. My secretary is an insufferable snob, Yalie.” He claps off laughing across through the crowd, swinging his fob chain. His mistress trails behind him, and her daughter, blushing with the weight of newly-found political relevance, nods and smiles to their admirers like a debutant or the queen.

CHAPTER SIX

The burnished brass skirt of the snake goddess heel to the palm of my hand like the hilt of a dagger. Her gold breasts are naked, and there is an X etched beneath her navel, where her abdomen pushes forward to a round dome. I upend the thing, and the statue is a bell. The clapper strikes the muted side held fast against my palm and coughs and choked note of a whooping crane. I cover the mouth with a stray sofa cushion and walk into Hanna’s penthouse dining room, cane leg and right foot first, then the sloping, weaker left. Everyone waits, watching me from the table. Hannah’s plumage trembles, and I find it hard, when she looks at me, not to think of a sandstone temple carving of the head of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. The rearing, undulating body of a female python set to strike. “I can’t imagine how you stand life in the institution, Mr. Aubrey.” She puts her hand in Salome’s lap. “How long have you been confined to the sickroom?” Hanna motions for the meat to be brought before him and starts to carve. At my elbow a dish of stewed pears swim in a reddish whipped sauce. I pass a currant jelly, dropped from a heart-shaped mold onto a bed of wilting lettuce leaves, to the smirking aid. “Seven years. This is my fourth institution.” “Oh?” She puts her elbows on the table and leans over her plate as a tureen of watercress soup travels under her nose. She wets her lips. “It must be so romantic, living in the shadow of death.” Hanna stands to distribute the roast. “Aubrey here is a grandee of the Spanish nobility. That is much like a knight, Mrs. Barclay. I once heard tell of an Earl who died here, but that was before I bought my quarter share.” “Spanish nobility?” The toady secretary stands and throws his napkin at the molded heart. “Our boys lie drown at the bottom of the Havana harbor and we dine with relatives of the perpetrators?” I mean to stand, like a man, and bid them all a fair evening, but Hanna cuts the 34

man off at the quick. “He’s no more involved in this than my grandmother. Sit down, man. He’s an invalid, for Christ’s sake.” The secretary replies that he cannot, in good conscious, break bread with our enemies and leaves the suite of rooms. “Good riddance.” Hanna tucks into his slice of beef. “The head of the nursing staff laid into me when we were barely off the train.” He gestures at me with his knife. “The most ridiculous accusations. You can’t arrest a man just because his blood is blue and he likes a snort now and again, that’s what I always say. Ha!” He hits the corner of the table and the radish salad rattles against the silver soup tureen. “Now Aubrey, how did this fantastic document come into your possession?” Blue blood is a Spanish expression. It came into use in the fifteenth century, when the Castilian nobility found it necessary to distance themselves from the Muslim ruling elite. One can only see the blue veins wriggling through the body through pallid Christian skin, skin that has never dealt with the yellow papyrus pages of the Koran, or the ancient leather of the Torah. I take a sip of wine. “My godmother claimed some ancient ancestor liberated it from the Holy Land during the first crusade.” “I wasn’t aware that the Spanish participated in the Crusades,” Hanna says. When he drinks, a line of dribbled wine runs down his chin and his mistress wipes it away from his mouth like an attentive mother with a coddled child. Salome cuts a boiled new potato in half with the side of her fork, a greenish twinge to her skin. “When I was a nursing girl here, I met this Earl you mentioned, dear.” Hannah speaks, gasping, like a child tired of waiting for a break in the conversation. “We called him the Vampire Earl, because all those boys disappeared during that year. No one ever pinned it on him satisfactorily, of course.” She sighs, and seems to look at her inverted reflection in her polished soup spoon. “And then he died, but the other nurses told the most lurid stories.” Hanna slurps his stewed pears, ignoring her. No one asks her to elaborate on the lurid stories the other nurses told. “In the end they think he added nine months to his life by drinking human blood. What do you think of the blood cure, Mr. Aubrey?” “I‘m not much for it.” I make a deep, demonstrative breath. “Give me the pine sap air, it’s miraculous. And give me some reason to get out of bed.” I glance at Salome. She 35

cuts through the potato again, bell-clank of cutlery on the fine glazed china. Mark Hanna holds his fat hand out to me like a shalaylee. “I’m sure this prophecy project is a stimulating hobby. Let’s see it.” I pull the box from my jacket pocket and work the mechanism; the lid springs open. “How drôle!” Mrs. Barclay claps her hands and her bird feathers shudder and molt. “Work the lock again!” I pass the box to Hanna. He puts on a pair of spectacles and picks up the leather fragment with a clean napkin covering his hand. He passes the empty box to his woman. “It’s Hebrew, Mrs. Barclay.” “Mr. Aubrey can read nine languages.” It is the first thing Salome has said out loud all evening. “Can he now?” Hanna looks over his glasses and Salome drops her eyes to her lap, the green at the edge of her mouth giving way to a forward rush of blood to her cheeks. Hanna scans the characters. “Have any taken you up on your offer for debate?” “No sir, the story was quite buried by the disaster and the rumored war. It seems I won’t die famous, after all.” Hanna laughs. He claps me on the back. “Good man. Like that spirit. Mrs. Barclay?” He snaps his fingers and Hannah pushes the box over the tablecloth, the tips of her fingers pressing the large oval-shaped emerald. He replaces the scripture and closes the box. “Don’t mind if I hold onto it for a few days, have my men give it a look?” “Certainly.” He eats like a field hand, his shoulders slumped towards his plate and his arms dug in to the task like me at my pushrims, and it’s hard to remember that here sits the man who invented the new publicity politics. “Such a charming patriotic demonstration the girls held for us, wasn’t it darling? Salome, does the nursing core drill every day or was that a special pageant in your uncle‘s honor?” “We have calisthenics exercises in the mornings,” Salome says. Hanna pushes away from the table and belches. “Indeed, a fascinating fad, calisthenics. I should like to see a demonstration.” “Well, go on Salome, demonstrate the movements.” Salome pushes her plate away, pulls the tip of her braid to her mouth, and hides 36

behind her hand. No one speaks. Hanna looks at her, observes her with cordoned-off expressionless face of an audience member at a picture show. At last she gives way to his silent glance and stands, stands, as unsteady on her two feet with the diner table watching as I am on my three. She steps back from the table and stands on the pinewood runner that separates the dining room from the drawing room, and raises her hands over her head. The round belly appears in the straining front of her dress. She folds over to touch her toes, then rises again. “Matron says we must try to touch the sky,” she says. “She counts out fifteen beats with her riding crop, and we hold.” Salome stretches, and the stomach appears again, the mountain overlooking the fertile, prehistoric valley. Hanna watches her, the curve disappearing and reappearing. His breathing slows to a tubercular catch. He forgets himself and breathes through his mouth. Salome bends at her waist, her right arm sliding down the eastern ribbon of her body to her ankle, and the roundness emerges like the ripe red fruit of knowledge hanging heavy on the tree. “I’m sure that’s quite enough.” Mrs. Barclay rises from her place and claps her hands for the wait staff. “I can’t believe the matron has you performing those provocative movements, really, I shall speak to the doctor in the morning. Some man is likely to catch you at that and get ideas.” Salome straightens, holding her elbow. “Run and fetch Mr. Aubrey’s things, it’s late.” “Hold on, now, the man hasn’t had his brandy.” Hanna rises from table and the china rattles in the huge credenza behind his chair. “And I promised you a picture show, come into the drawing room and watch.” “Edison is working on a series of films to put the public off alternating current,” Hanna says. “Brilliant stuff, electrocuting elephants and the like. All very hush hush at this stage. Not for female eyes.” Hanna pulls the drawing room screen closed along the runner, screech of un-oiled wheels twisting on their pegs. He loads the canister on the spindle, feeds the photographic tape through a thin slot, and turns the hand crank. On a screen on the far wall, a woman in a silk scarf and feathered ball gown dances. As she twirls and twists, she drops the scarf, which floats to her feet like sediment settling to the ocean floor. “One minute, then the electrocution. Mrs. Barclay, bring the snifters.” The women leave the room. “Have you heard about the electric method of execution, Mr. Aubrey?” He offers me a cigar from portable humidor case. I indicate that I have not 37

heard of electric execution. “Very modern, the most humane method in my humble opinion. Clean, industrious, like the country. Death is almost instantaneous.” The elephant jerks, its eyes bulge and twitch, and then it collapses like a slab of crumbling rock-face in the aftermath of a blast of dynamite. “I saw it play out under my own nose a few months ago, when the state legislature handed down the decision in that crazed rapist case, what was his name, only seventeen years old and solid as a rock until the doctor taped the electrode to the top of his head. Then he pissed himself.” Salome brings me my shawl and cane, my gloves and hat, and holds my elbow while I dress myself. Hannah joins us in the hall, where a staff butler waits with my wicker chair. “Has the lift come?” I allow myself to be put in my chair, and Hannah smiles over me, the skin around her eyes folded and creased by years of feigned interest and forced laughter. “I only want what’s best for you, Salome,” she says. “That’s why I do it.” She drops her voice to a whisper, looks suspiciously at the staff man, and hisses at me. “I’m not a whore. I know that’s what you think of me.” “Of course not, Madame.” I tap my hat on my knee. The waiter withdraws. The elevator operator polishes the gilt handle with the sleeve of his coat. “Take Mr. Aubrey to his room and then come back up here to see me. I want to speak to you before I go to bed.” “Yes, Mama.” Salome slides in behind me in the lift, and puts her hand on my shoulder. I cover it with my own. When she helps me into bed she says, “She’s not as bad as I remember.” “Did you find a large dress?” “I have one hidden in my tuck box.” “Go to the dormitory and put it on.” She picks up the green bottle, now a fixture like a lamp on my beside table, and pulls the cork. “You’re supposed to have these drops. Matron says.” “Matron says a lot of things that aren’t true in my case.” She breaks the electric circuit that illuminates my room, and the key scrapes the hull in the doorknob as she locks me in for the night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The doctor removes his coat and hat, and gives them to the nurse. “Matron says you’ve been taking the analgesic. Right. Had any physical discomfort?” My right hand shakes, but not for want of alcohol. I shove it under the belt of my robe. My torn lungs scar and whisper like they did before the war started, only more so. My breaths come in a shower of mini-ball shots that drop like hail on the dry rotting boards of the deck. Less air to fill my sails, I float on stagnant water. “I could almost walk, a day or two ago. I walked upstairs and had dinner with Mark Hanna.” “Did you, now? Very busy man, that Hanna. All over the country with his fat finger in this pie and that one. The last time you had a drink was?” “The day the Maine exploded.” “Right.” The doctor pulls his watch out of his pocket and checks the time. “That’ll be, five days let’s say. And you haven’t touched a drop?” I answer him. He crouches on the floor next to my chair, and puts his hand on the arm rest. “You see the thing is, Aubrey, it’s highly likely it is the laudanum that affected your mobility.” “But I’ve been bedridden for years.” He cuts me off. “Not your immobility, the recent return of the appearance of health. The laudanum boosts you up, like, like…” His thumb strokes the glass cover of the pocket watch. “An albatross?” “Well I wouldn’t be so queer about it, but yes, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Right. It’s a charm of sorts, its dulls your nerves and helps you fight.” He takes out his notebook and his pen case and makes a mark against my name. “I want you to start taking the drops again, and not kick up a fuss about it. We’ll start you out with three and see how you manage. Do you understand?” 39

I understand. The doctor wants to feed the bird and make some kind of pet out of it. The matron would have me shoot it just to hang it on my neck. When the nurse comes with the small green bottle, and she is not Salome, I take the goddamned drops. *** Afternoon of dreams of floating on the ocean, begging the captain for water, and the captain is Mark Hanna and his beard is made of straps of ancient leather. The nurse wakes me with the clatter of the afternoon tray and tea. She helps me to the chair beside the open window. The volunteer soldiers of the 4th Thomasville brigade are practicing packing their kit on the hotel lawn. One thumps and shakes his camp stove like a gypsy tambourine. “I’ve got your paper for you, Mr. Aubrey.” “Thank you, could you spread it open on the desk, and bring me the stereopticon, its in a case underneath the bed.” There is a small mention of my fantastic prophecy, buried deep beneath an advertisement for MacIntosh Rubber Raincoats. “The Rain falls with equality on the just and the unjust,” it claims in cheap block letters riding the arch of a yellow print rainbow. “Which plate set, Mr. Aubrey?” “Load the one labeled ‘John and Salome’.” The article announces the exhibition of the photographic plates at the office of the Journal and invites all public discussion. I am not mentioned. “Would it be possible to send a telegram? Or do I have to crawl across the street?” “I can send the bursar upstairs and he can take down the message for you, if that will suit.” She puts the viewer in my hand, loads the plates in the mechanism, and pulls the trigger to check their position. “There you are, and there’s Salome. Someday I‘ll ride to New York City on the train, just to see it performed at The Palace.” She smiles and peeks around the hood at the actress frozen in the final frame. The actress’s hair is jet black, and her mouth trembles at the corners and stretches flat and plastic near the center like a woman’s genitalia, or the mouth of Hannah Barclay. *** I pull the trigger, and the story starts again. Plate 1 slides into place. Two women, hair like wedding veils, one as young and 40

fresh as Salome and the other older than the act of love. They clutch each other in front of a pagan alter, fires blazing from clay and gilt-covered brazier pots, both swollen with child. The older woman’s face is contorted in a grotesque mask of searing pain. Plate 2. A boy in a haircloth tunic bites the head from a writhing locust. Beside him on the painted rock formation a papier-mâché bee hive torn in half, bleeding honey. Surrounding him is nothing, an endless black expanse. Plate 3. The same boy, taller, broader, stands waist deep in a river of undulating silk. A man with a gold wire crown shoved tight around his ears stands in the river beside him with his arms and shoulders folded in the pious pose of prayer. Above their heads a stuffed white dove dangles from a barely-visible string. Plate 4. A fat man with grapevine curls shakes his fist at a column of kneeling soldiers. A leering woman, her eyes outlined in kohl, clings to the man’s pork shank leg and rubs her breasts against it. Her chin is tilted upwards, in mock worship, the crass wrinkle of triumph touches the corner of her eyes. I pull the trigger. Plate 5. Salome peeps from behind a swirling ribbon of silk, tongues of suns and moons drawn over her naked body in black paint, her nipples rouged a smooth blood-red. Her body undulates and she thrusts her pelvis forward. The fertile crescent of her belly entices the viewer, invites. Plate 6. The famous actress and the leering, seething woman press their foreheads together in profile, drape of white gauze suggesting the private chambers of the mistress of the King. The snake charms of their molded plaster crowns touch at the tongues. They are both laughing. Plate 7. Salome takes the severed head from the silver platter and holds to inches from her face. Her face a mask of ecstasy, she prepares to kiss its lips. I am in my room watching these still lives move through the mechanism when Hannah Barclay discovers that her daughter is pregnant. Some claims can only be made through pictures. In my imagination, the pictures looks like this: Salome, the tip of the red braid wet and frayed with her sucking, crouches on the floor of the Hanna parlor and lays her head in her mother’s lap. Lady Barclay wipes her daughter’s tears with a clean white cotton handkerchief. Sunlight through the window 41

casts a golden halo gleaming at the crown of Salome’s head. In the drawing room, Mark Hanna bends over his desk with a magnifying glass and a stylus. He scans the Hebrew letters for an inkling of the truth. Something irregular in the scribal hand catches his attention when he comes to .

*** The nurse shakes me awake. “The bursar’s come to write your telegram.” Clyde sits down to my desk and opens his ledger. “Aubrey,” he says. “You look no worse for wear. Have a pen handy?” “You busted mine, remember?” “Well there’s no need for criminal accusations.” He produces a nib box and pen from his leather case, as formal and utilitarian as a doctor‘s bag. He palms the bottle of blood ink I mixed to forge the document. “This ink smells like pennies.” He shakes the nip and wipes it on his napkin. “It has a queer skin on it.” “There’s a box of commercial inks in my wardrobe, underneath the shirts.” “I’ll make do. Get on with it, I haven‘t got all night.” “Fine. Thurston. Make more of two kings angle. What if the prophet meant this war, these two kings who reign in Spain. Behold a virgin has conceived and works here at The Woods. I cry to you from the wilderness.” He copies out my message in my blood. “Are you sure you want to send this? Or is this some misguided attempt at publicity?” I talk and talk for hours, staring out the window, the north star to guide my rudder. I talk about the wave of ships and the child rising from the waters. The squid and the Man of War at battle. The green clouds of bitter opium that contaminate the sea. Clyde writes until the ink runs dry, then says he’ll have no more of it. He shoves the sheaf of papers in his case and goes to the commissary to have his dinner, me sitting at the desk. The door is open on the hallway and the openness leaves me feeling queasy. Nothing gives so much comfort as when the key turns over in the lock.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The nurse brings the green bottle and a paper cup of water from the tasting station at the artesian well. “Doctor says you’re to have one cup for every fifteen minutes you’re out here. Are you comfortable, Mr. Aubrey?” “Quite.” I stick out my tongue and take my drops, then sip from the paper cup. The hotel brochure claims that the spring water has curative properties. It tastes like the vial of holy water I stole and drank as a child, lukewarm with a pissy mineral twinge. The nurse shows me how to suck in deep, aggressive draughts of sap-thick pine tree air. After an hour of bringing my cups, she clears me for the walk back to the hotel. I lean on my cane and stump my way along the path that snakes around the lake. The men are coming in from the fox hunt, packs of dogs jostling at their boot heels as they trod up out of the woods. As I come around the curve, I see Hanna and the secretary crouching in the firebreak poking a hand mirror with a stick. A step further, and the mirror becomes a steel trap. I hang back, watching. Hanna crouches over the trap and pushes the spring lever. The broken paw of some deranged animal sticks in the rusty teeth as the trap pulls open. His aid noses it loose with the snub of his gun. “We can probably find the body over there,” he says, and aims his rifle into the stand of trees that mark the firebreak. “Nine to nothing it was a bitch. If we can find her, we can tell everyone we got the pelt.” The skin hardened in the few days it hung suspended in the trap and had jerked clear of the bone, as if the shredded leg, at the moment of snapping off the body, decided it would try to become a stone. Hanna tossed the lost appendage to his dog. “It’s a desperate animal that does that.” He drags the chain of the trap out of the dirt path with the barrel of his rifle, and kicks it into the grass. “Thought she could crawl back to the pups.” The bloodhound yelps from the tree line. It presses its ham-hock shoulder against the earth and then falls on itself, rolling and kicking in the firebreak. “Dogs have got the 43

body,” the aid says. “How’s that?” “They’re rubbing in the scent.” Hanna and the aid press into the trees where both dogs roll in the pine straw, thrashing and kicking at the air. I follow them, leaning into and behind the trees. A slough of rolling sap sticks to me and stains my breast pocket. Between the dogs the carcass slumps, its stomach caved in. The aid whistles and barks “Heel!” and the dogs roll off the thing and slink towards the man with their bodies close to the ground. Hanna nudges the body open with his boot. The stump, a sliver of bone, is licked clean at the right elbow. The rest of the body is caked in mud and brown, dried blood. The aid stoops down and sprinkles a handful of dirt over its engorged, rapidly deflating teats. Then he raises his shotgun, aims it at the head of the dead animal, and fires. A volley of buckshot rips through the carcass and kicks up the earth. The aid bends over the dead thing with his knife and slices away the tail. “What was the purse, 50 greenbacks?” “Gold,” says Hanna. “I put it up myself. You’ll be donating it to my presidential election campaign.” The aid laughs. “If I live to see the day. Could be this Aubrey character is right, and the millennial war is upon us.” He kicks the body of the dead mother fox away, and the dogs lunge at it and tear it to shreds. “I’ve got a man working on that,” Hanna says. “When there is writing on the wall, it’s best to try and read it.“ He props his rifle on his shoulder and he and the aid head towards the hotel with the counterfeit pelt. I lean against the bleeding tree, breathing. After a space of minutes, I start to walk again. Walking is magnificent. I stand like a man, an old man, but no matter, I can see the tops of things again. A woman approaches, and I see the soft sheen of light on the crown of her head instead of the short black hairs that grow in random patches underneath her chin. I can walk across the street to the newspaper office, if I want, and no one has to come and help me halfway through my quest. I can walk down a dirt path without thinking about the roots and dead branches that lie in my way. When I come to the edge of the lake I stop and lean against the split-rail fence and 44

listen to the hum of insects fornicating and giving birth in the wilderness beyond. On a wooden barge near the boat dock a young woman wrapped in blankets and stuffed into a bundling box stares at the blank February sky while her party, her family, sits laughing in a circle on the loping barge eating sandwiches. A Negro orderly with a long cane pole pushes against the bottom, and the barge glides over the surface of the lake towards the dock at the breathing huts. The woman in the box is bone white and blue at the tip of her nose, as broken in her own box as the ivory instructional statuette I found in the doctor’s office. Her mother helps her raise her head to feed her. When the party reaches the far shore, the orderly lifts her, box and all, chest high, and the family follows him as he carries her up the hill. I sit down on the damp grass and open my sketchbook. The spine breaks on the marble of blood I pressed between the pages weeks ago, smashed flat like an irregular thumbprint. The blood smear curves from a voluminous circle to a thin line, like a woman in an evening gown with a wedding-ring waist. I trace an outline down the profile, then add a pair of white shoulders and a deep maul of threatening cleavage. I leave the body headless, but around the torso I sketch a bundling box and on the side of the box I write “consumption.” “There he is, Captain Triplet!” I look up from my page, my blood and my crayon, and Hannah Barclay flaps towards me, black ostrich feathers smoldering like roman candles in her elaborate hat netting, the newspaper man and the matron trotting behind her, pressing down on me like the cover of a notebook, closing. I struggle to stand, and when Mrs. Barclay gets within striking distance she shoves me against the split rail fence and I topple to the ground. “How dare you touch my daughter,” she screams. “I’ll have your head!” Triplet helps me up and hands my cane to me and steps between my body and Hannah‘s swinging fists. “Now settle down Mrs. Barclay, the man is innocent ’til proven guilty. Right now it’s your word against his.” The matron snorts like a Brahma bull. “He’s a degenerate opium addict and a drunk, and she’s an innocent child.” I cower behind Captain Triplet with my notebook shielding my face. “What’s this all about?” 45

“Doesn’t look good, Aubrey.” The Captain holds the flailing woman in his arms while she kicks and screams. The matron says, “You stand accused of the rape of Salome Barclay. We’ve come to see you arrested and removed from sight immediately.” “Did you tell that girl she was carrying the messiah?” “Blasphemous.” “Why won’t you arrest him Captain Triplet? He’s raped my only child!” I stand and stammer, and the Captain takes away my cane. He turns my body and puts my hands behind my back, and he cuffs me in iron shackles. I can’t walk without my hands. I can’t support the entire weight of my body without my cane. The matron takes Mrs. Barclay with a firm arm and leads her, hysterical, back to the hotel, while Triplet and I sit in the damp grass and wait for reinforcements. “You’re taking like a man, like Jefferson Davis.” Triplet chews on the stem of his pipe. “I admire that.” The sun is setting when the family remerges on the far side of the lake and boards their barge. When they land at the boat dock, Triplet yells “Jack, come and help me transport a prisoner.” The black man waves his hat at Triplet, then carries the woman in the bundling box through the open doors of the sun porch lobby. When he returns the sun is setting, a streak of red shot through the fat trimmed off the night. Triplet opens my journal and flips through the pages as Jack hoists me over his shoulder. His thumb rests on the image of my boxed consumption. “This don’t look good at all.”

CHAPTER NINE

My jail cell is an eight-by-four-foot barred closet in the bowels of the hotel. From the iron cot hinged to the wall I watch Clyde comb his moustaches through the wireframe bursar cage and turn his brave back on the yawning mouth of the hotel safe. Everything of value in the hotel hides a small box at the other end of the hall, and a smug cock of a man to guard it from me. When he closes the shutters and climbs the stairs to the dining room, I force myself to stumble towards the enamel chamber pot in the corner. My organs, bound up in tight orderly knots for weeks, barely anything escaping the machine my body had become, now feel loose, and muddy. I can barely stand. I crouch against the wall and stain the wooden boards with my fluids. When Clyde returns in the morning, he’ll act nasty about the smell. I try to sleep. I roll onto my side and face the wall. In a shallow saucer of a dream I see a statue in the center of my cell, a bronze monument to Captain Triplet with his fist raised, my pen knife in his hand. When I awake, Salome crouches with a rag and pale, scrubbing my floor through the cell bars, washing away my sins in the far corner. “John.” She drops the scullery instruments and runs to kneel beside my cot. She reaches through the bars and tries to catch my clammy hand. She wipes the beads of sweat at my hairline and on my upper lip. “I told them; they won’t believe me.” I stare at her from the filthy sheets the orderly dropped on the cot for bedding, and she says my pupils are the size of pinpricks. My breathing sounds like wet floorboards creaking. My shirt is smeared and sticky with pine sap, and here and there down the front of my dress shirt, tiny red flecks of blood. “You shouldn’t be here. Get away from me.” I clutch her hand, try to touch her elbow. 47

She cries, soot-streaks down her cheeks. “They don’t know, nobody knows, they all think I’m on the Plant train to Tampa with Mama and Mr. Hanna and the troops, locked in my berth. But I’ve run away again.” “Where will you go?” I keep my sights focused on the chicken wire cage at the far end of the hall. “A house in the woods. I ran away there once before. I have a cart, and your medicine. Run with me.” I start to laugh, a sick laugh with the brass dent of a scream at the end. “I’ll never make it out of the Woods.” There is no safe harbor on sea or on land. None. “I never said you raped me. I tried to tell them the angel did it, and they wouldn’t believe me.” She presses her head between the bars and rocks back and forth on her knees like a penitent pilgrim. “They don’t believe anything I say, only what they saw. And Mr. Hanna thinks it might look good in the papers, I heard him tell his secretary when they went in last night to dress for dinner. Because you’re Spanish.” I try to quiet her. I tell her to whisper. I put my dirty hand through the bars and try to cover her mouth. But Salome must confess. “They wouldn’t know anything about the baby, but Mama.” My head pounds and my body convulses in sporadic jerks. She waits for this fit to subside, with my hand in hers and her head on my chest. When it dies off, she says “My mother is an evil woman, Mr. Aubrey.” When she says ‘mama’ her mouth turns down at the corner and her lips flatten out and she looks like her mother with the combustible light of industry in her eyes. The light at the far side of the hall pops out and no one appears with a candlestick to lift the old gas burner on the wall. We are alone in the dark, a shard of moonlight from the grated window near the ceiling. “How did you get in here?” She pulls up a chain that hangs from her waist and shows me the skeleton key that dangles from the belt like and anchor. “This is the key to every room in the hotel,” she says. “Give it to me.” She hands the chain through the bars and I trace the molded lines of it with the tip of my index finger. There is a star of David on the handle, where the ribcage of the skeleton body fits against the palm. I could free every prisoner in this hotel before I die, if I had my wheelchair and knew how to work the lift. I could sail over the 48

floorboards at a frantic clip and hardly even pause; one door after another, the key turns over in the lock. “You have laudanum? Give it to me.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the green bottle. I open my mouth and stick out my swollen, purplish tongue. She administers the drops. “I’m going to fight,” I say. My body jerks, my legs shoot out and kick the wall and she runs to the latch and shoves the key in the lock and the cell door swings open. She climbs onto the cot next to me and covers my body with hers and forces me still. “No one knew for sure about the baby until yesterday, even me.” I think about her, legs splayed, her underwear hanging between her knees and the blood from the roof of my mouth in the enamel dish on the sink in my water closet. All my sketches confiscated by the hotel staff as evidence, the enamel bowl disinfected and stored away on the high shelf out of reach. The underwear washed and stained in some other secret, shameful closet and planted in her laundry and washed again. Her body is mine in miniature and her breaths are short like mine, but the fabric of her lungs is true and whole. She holds me to the bed with her arm and leg over my body, and I feel the roundness of her belly protrude against my hip. I touch her there. “Have you felt the baby kick?” “No, nothing but a flutter. Like a butterfly inside me.” “Tell me how it happened.” I meant for her tell me about the baby, where it came from. It’s only once she’s finished that I realize she is talking about my cell. “I woke up in Mama’s room on Mr. Hanna’s floor, and there was no one in the room with me. There was some black hairs on the pillow so I know Mama came in at some point and went to sleep. She had a black dressing gown flung over her mirror, so I pulled that down and wrapped it around my waist, and I tied the belt up high to hide myself. And I didn’t hear any noises, nothing on the whole floor moved, for all that it was late morning. I went looking for her, calling her name through the house.” She wears that engine face, the face that tastes like laudanum. When I reach up to touch her hair, she braces for another convulsion. The light twists on at the end of the hallway. We both hold our breath. A voice, the negro orderly, shouts “Aubrey, are you dead?” I cough and the light twists off again, and I hear his heavy step on the stairs. 49

After several minutes of silence, Salome whispers in my ear. “She was in the drawing room, with Mr. Hanna.” She presses her cheek against my neck. When she pushes my arms back into the sheets, I nudge her mouth towards mine and kiss her. She turns her face away. “Don’t touch me like that,” she says. Salome shifts her weight against mine and now I am restrained in earnest and helpless underneath her tiny body. My penis jerks in its own miniscule convulsion, the first hint of stiffening I’ve had from those quarters in years. “No, it was more than that. They were naked together. I pulled open the drawing room door and they were doing something to each other on the desk, with their… down there.” I draw the drawing room runner aside, and the pine block screen clatters down the track in its groove, louder than the clack of mock-rifle mops on the pinewood platform the day Hanna arrived from Ohio. They wanted her to catch them at it. For all they knew, they planned to rape her. I see Hanna on the desk, looking over the shoulder of the woman writhing on his lap, at the girl in the doorway, licking his bladdery lips. The woman dare not show her bitter, laudanum face. “I ran as fast as I could, with my whole stomach in my throat. When I got to the dormitory I couldn’t even make it through the door; I fell down on my knees and vomited in the elephant-foot planter. Someone ran for Matron, and she came screaming through the door and caught me at it. She jerked me back by my hair and stuck her finger in my sick and examined it, chalky white and foamy and smelling like bile. She said if she had been a nurse a thousands years and never seen the day she would have known what that signified. Then she took me in to lie in quarantine and sent Miriam to fetch the doctor, and told her to be quick about it for she’ll hide no woman’s shame. And I just lay there on the cot staring at the oil painting on the wall over the bed, and if I could have made it fifteen more feet to the bathing sink no one ever would have known about it and you‘d be a free man right now.” She is silent for awhile, the bare skin of memory writhing on Mark Hanna’s elaborate carved-oak desk. “If I were ever a free man,” I say, “I’d have killed him. I guess I never knew freedom.” “I never said you were the one who done it. They brought Mama in and she was 50

wailing and kicking up a fuss, screaming ’someone touched my child’ and ’someone messed with my child’ and all I could see on her face was that nasty look in his eyes when I drew back the partition.” Salome fights down another round of kicks and jerks, their severity lessening now, the opium spreading through my body into every stream and tributary. “When Matron said it was you, they wouldn’t hear no other theory. But I tried to tell them about the prophecy and Mama slapped me and called me a little fool. They’ll be in Tampa tomorrow morning before they even know we’re gone.” “I’m not going anywhere, I’m going to stay and let them hang me.” She doesn’t speak for a long time. She chews the starch in the collar of my dirty shirt, and holds my body to the cot when it fights for air. “I am soon to die, by one method or another. You run into the woods and find a cracker boy to marry you, and stay out there and work the land. It don’t matter who the father is, that child is the son of God and any natural man will see it. If I run, it’ll be like saying I did it. I’m not man enough for much but I can stand this one time and let the world know I know the truth.” She is crying, wet creeps down my neck and soaks the back of my collar. “What is the truth?” I start to recite, and to translate, and maybe these two things are one. “Behold a virgin shall conceive,” I whisper. She slips the bottle into my fist. I push the key against her lips. When it is morning and I jerk awake, the cell is locked and Salome is gone. *** On the day of my trial a diver in Granada observes a live squid underwater while exploring the sunken ruins of a decaying pirate ship. The newspaper claims that the man, of sound mind and body, watched the squid emerge from nowhere near a tiled mosaic on a sturdy, load-bearing wall. “I had my eye on that picture, right on it, trying to puzzle out how to bring it to the surface, and this creature just appeared out of nowhere, like it was a ghost.” Scientists counter that the creature, if it can be proven to exist, is, like other cephalopods, a chameleon. A demonstration is arranged in Lisbon. A biologist and his assistants construct a chessboard mosaic at the bottom of a saltwater tank before a live audience. Volunteers are asked to certify that there are no mirrors or hidden trap doors. The scientists fill the tank with ocean water, then carefully lower an octopus, cylindrical 51

arms twisting and writhing against each other and over the guide ropes, into the tank. To the amazement of the public, the animal crouches low on the bottom and then vanishes from plain sight. The speaker inserts a long thin rod into the water and scratches the black-and-white bottom. When the eye of the creature opens, the audience erupts in terrified screams. I fold the newspaper closed and toss it on the floor. The MacIntosh Rubber Raincoat man grins up at me from underneath his rainbow of equality-through-mutually- assured-destruction. Captain Triplet stoops to pick the paper up and hands it through the bars to my lawyer. “So, that is to say, you understand the charges.” I turn my face to the wall. A few loose strands of red hair lie on the sheet between us. “I do. I am not a child.” “Come on, Aubrey, don’t make this harder on yourself. We have the girl’s confession. We have the your journal, and it’s filled with naked breasts. And your documented alcohol addiction. And your medical dependence on opium.” “They made me take the opium, they said it would cure me of the alcohol.” The lawyer clears his throat, then coughs. It’s the toady political aid, somehow left behind as Hanna’s agent, judge, jury and executioner by way of the defense. “And this hoax you attempted to perpetuate about the rebirth of the Messiah.” He enters my cell, clatter of iron bars, snap of spring lock, and we are all locked inside the hotel, I hope forever. He whips a case against my cot, works the mechanism, and the lid snaps up. A sheaf of telegrams, some sent, some never sent, and on the top the long dictation I made to Clyde about the kings of Spain. “You sure as hell look guilty,” Triplet says. He takes his cavalry hat off and runs his hand over his naked skull. “The girl herself couldn’t give a better story than you can, for all that it sounds like you coached her through it.” The toad-man shakes his fist of papers in my face. “You thought you could play God, didn’t you, you vile degenerate?” “Hold on now, Jackson, you’re meant to defend this boy. There’s got to be a fair trail or there’s no justice in it.” Jackson slams the case shut and yanks the cell door open. “What can you do to 52

stop me? You’re a broken old man just like the rest of these filthy invalids. Jefferson Davis was a homosexual! He loved wearing women‘s dresses!” The toad-man hops on the elevator, mocking the tiny corseted waist of Jefferson Davis with his flailing hands. As the gilded cage rises he screams down at us through the open shaft: “Mark Hanna wants your head, John Aubrey, and I mean to see that he gets it! On a silver platter!” Triplet lets himself out. He shakes like I do, but with anger. His laugh is as clear and as measured as commercial cough syrup. “Do you believe me?” I ask. He pulls the brim of the cat down hard on his eyes. “I don’t believe nothing,” he says, “except Jefferson Davis never wore no damn lady‘s corset. It’s as plain as that you did it, but they had better hang you fair.” He shoves the paper in the bursar‘s furnace, lights a match, and tosses it under iron-plate cover. “Damn newspapers ain’t for nothing but advertisements anymore.” *** In the end, they didn’t hang me. They strapped me to a chair. The key turned over in the lock. The nurse brought a pale basin to my bedside. She soaked my naked body with a sea sponge, worked the powders into a rich lather as she rubbed the natural fiber down my legs. She scraped along the inside of my thigh with a straight razor, and wiped away the hair. Her hair was the muddy color of wet clay, and her back seized and jerked when I reached up to touch her long brown braid. The prison guard landed a cuff against my ear and restrained my hands while he shouted for another man to come and strap my legs down. The nurse blended back against the wall, holding the basin and the sponge, the veins in her arms royal blue beneath her paper skin. Blue blood. Sangre azul, a Castilian expression. It means the skin is white, and thin, like the pages of the Bible. Once restrained, and innocuous, she knelt behind my iron cot and shaved my head. The chair was the portable Westinghouse chair from Louisiana, brought in on the train from the Port of New Orleans. When they brought me into the operating room, the first thing I noticed was how filthy the apparatus was. Strips of charred skin hardened around the electrodes and pieces of man fused to the iron frame. The doctor forced my toes apart and attached the lower electrode to the paper thin skin between them. He 53

applied a second electrode with a sponge to the top of my head. He brushed the dust from the knees of his trousers, and it was the last dust my living skin ever touched. Captain Triplet stood at my left with a Bible in his hand and asked if I wanted a prayer. The doctor said, “I don’t know but the first jolt might just cure this man’s consumption.” I ask that Triplet read Isaiah 7:14-16. All the men stood silent in a pocket watch half-moon around me. When he came to the part about the two kings, I shout for the doctor to pull the switch. I am a body of pure incandescent energy, a floating bladder of electric light. Warm water fills my lungs and my muscles bunch and contract as I expel a jet stream of fluid and rise, like an angel, through the salt sea. Above me, the underbelly of a ghost ship, hull cracked and broken open with cannon, body choked with bilge and forgotten treasure, the ship trailing the tangled carcasses of long-dead men in its dragging rigging. Two grasping, knife-like tentacles shoot out from the center of my body and I grasp the broken ship. I wrap my body, my eight strong arms, around the boards and pull the boat beneath the cresting waves. As I drag the ghost ship under, a spray of black ink clouds the water.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Allison McEntire grew up in Thomasville, Georgia near the footprint of the Pineywoods Resort, which burned to the ground in 1910. She graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2000 with a B.A. in History, and returned to Thomasville to work as the Director of Communications for the Thomasville Cultural Center. Her poems have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Barrelhouse Magazine, and The Vanderbilt Review.