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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012 Night Music from Another World Jonathan Bellot

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COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

NIGHT MUSIC FROM ANOTHER WORLD

BY JONATHAN BELLOT

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, 2012

Jonathan Bellot defended this thesis on March 15, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Julianna Baggott Professor Directing Thesis

Mark Winegardner Committee Member

Diane Roberts Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

Dedicated to my parents, who let me let my quirks blossom, and to Lady Death, who gives me a wall to write against

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………v STORIES The Fisherman’s Vision………………………………………………………………………...... 1 Viola and the Passing of the Ghost Train…………………………………………………………4 The Princess Nemona Takes a Walk……………………………………………………………...8 Hyper Manicou plus Elliot versus Destroyer of Universes……………………………………...23 Even Amidst the Carnage of a Flying Saucer’s Spontaneous Appearance It May Be Found…...34 Aunt Maud……………………………………………………………………………………….39 Annihilate………………………………………………………………………………………...58 Juri’s Starship…………………………………………………………………………………….60 The Guest………………………………………………………………………………………...72 Follow……………………………………………………………………………………………74 Governorship……………………………………………………………………………………..76 Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………………….103

iv ABSTRACT

This is a collection of eleven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in spring, 2012. The stories, though varied, largely take place in the Caribbean (be the islands real or imagined composites of many islands), though “Follow” takes place in America and “The Princess Nemona Takes a Walk” is set both on a mysterious submersible and on the bottom of the ocean floor in an ocean that may or may not exist on Earth. The idea of parallel worlds or universes is explored in many of the stories, most prominently in the final story, “Governorship,” a historical piece that brings up the question of how the idea of these parallel worlds might affect readings of history. The collection is also a stylistic exploration in many ways, as certain stories, like “Viola and the Passing of the Ghost Train” (written almost entirely in one sentence) are stylistically significantly different others, like “Hyper Manicou plus Elliot Versus Destroyer of Universes.” These stories examine, often indirectly, what, if any, meaning we can extract from life after having learnt, through centuries, that we are tinier and less remarkable in the cosmic scheme of things than we could have ever imagined.

v The Fisherman’s Vision

The fisherman had told everyone but his love that (and his wife) he saw her in the worst of places: in the crests of waves, in a purple night’s constellations, in white dreams that left him as embarrassed as a teenager. He could not tell her—either of them. He had a wife of thirteen years and two bony little girls who had dim cowlike eyes so unlike the eyes of the lawyers and even presidents he had imagined they might be, eyes that melted him all the same when they told him Thank you for getting us dinner, we love you, and he would say You doh need to fank me for nothin’, and they would say Yes, we do, and Fank your mawder for preparing it, We did, but you caught it, Silly little girls, and his wife would stare and not say much but smile; to the fisherman, she could speak so well and it had to be because she had started getting an education before her parents could no longer afford to send her to primary school, and she was sometimes pretty, but she said little, and the girls spoke like she did. His rum-shop friends, who he had told about his vision, laughed. They had never seen anything like it and thought he had made it up or was crazy and they told him, You need better sex. Tell de wife—wha was her name again—Jordan aunt’s cousin, not true? Yeah, tell her to give you de Eve before de apple. And he had tried and it was all fine but not grand, not grand at all, yes, he had someone to hold and someone’s hand to press and trace besides his own as he did with himself alone in the boat, as he caressed the Dora the Explorer shirt he had worn for years, and he wondered what the girls thought the noises in the house were and decided many days that he didn’t want them to know, not for thirty or fifty years. The fisherman would sometimes drift off instead of looking for fish, and it would make no difference because most of what he caught was garbage, mossy sandals and Rasta locks that had come off in the water and Styrofoam containers that looked to him like clams, the one creature he felt awe and repulsion for. One time, he had drifted further out than ever, for he had felt that gray afternoon that he wanted nothing more than to just go into the horizon and never come back, leave everyone on shore. He had gone far, far, past the little guano-splattered rock where the clams bred and where the great sharks were said to live, he had just kept going, kept going until the sea turned gray and there seemed nothing to go to, and it was then he believed he had reached the end of the world, a concept he had not believed in until he felt its sublime terror. The fisherman had tried and tried to paddle back but he had lost sight of everything, madness, he went for five minutes in one way before deciding he was only going further towards that silent cataclysm; and then, as he lay in his boat and began to pray, first to God and then to

1 his wife and daughters, he felt the boat tremble. He flew up. Silent grayness, and then a whale the size of a comet rose out of the water, and on its back was a beautiful dark woman wearing nothing but her beauty, dark hair curly and matted as a mermaid’s. A tremendous wave rocked his boat. At the crest, he was suddenly, briefly, face-to-face with her; she had smiled, cradled his face, and blew him a kiss on the nose with breath that left him with visions of glistering neon palaces in far-off metal lands, and the only word he would remember thinking was Fortune. The next thing he knew, he was on the shore of the island, body soaked and lungs gray with pain, his net filled with a vast quantity of fishes he had never seen before. A crowd had gathered around him. His wife was in tears, his daughters silent and staring. Oh, my God, she said as he sat up. Thank the Lord. He had opened his mouth and gargoyled his face but no words would come out; indeed, he wasn’t able to speak for seven days, despite the incantations of Monsignor Bakkus and the fisherman’s wife’s new sexual positions, which she forced upon him each night for a week. It was only when he went out to fish on the seventh day, rowing as far as he could and finding nothing but the neighboring islands of the archipelago and teetering cruise ships and white speedboats filled with scuba-diving tourists in tight black suits off to who-knew-where he’d often wondered, that his voice returned, and it returned when he swore at the heavens and the deeps, realizing after a strain of you stupid bitchfocking mawder of Christ that he was swearing in his old voice. Except his voice was weak and ragged, a long-lost thing found. He sounded so different, indeed, that when he went home, his wife shrieked in a voice louder than he’d thought she was capable of and had alerted the Monsignor, who had been on his daily walk. The fisherman realized Bakkus would try to exorcise what he mistook for a malevolent deity and so he fled, running through the town of rusted and rotting shacks until he was out of breath. When he returned, the monsignor had gone and his wife had prepared the last of the fish they had saved up; he had brought nothing home that day. It was enough for one and a half persons. Sorry, he said. Is it really you? she asked, Of course, he said, My voice jess ole, is all, and he looked at the fish and said, Give it to de girls, What about you? asked the wife, I doh need any food, he replied, give it to dem, and have some too, You need it, she said, I not hungry, he said, You have to eat, you getting thin like a skeleton, she said, I doh want to eat no damn fish.

2 But he went out to sea again that night and tried his best to catch an octopus that had been lounging on the surface and then rowed back when he felt his boat being bumped by creatures he couldn’t see. He brought home a crab he had found on the beach when bringing the boat ashore as well as a bouquet of moss and seaweed and coral he had assembled, and when his wife, who was in tears as she cooked a can of corned beef because he had not told her he was going, saw the things in his hand, she swore, then chuckled, Always a sense of humor. I love you, he said. Thank you, she said. It’s true, he said, and I’m sorry, Me, too, she sighed, but don’t worry about those kinds of things, and let’s just go inside and get some rest, and in the morning you’ll have a crabback and you can look at the bouquet when you eat at the table, and I’ll hold your hand like you like, No, the fisherman said, I brought de crab for you, and I go make it for you myself, and all you need to give me at de table is your hand. And that night the fisherman slept in the arms of his wife like he had done with his mother and his girls came in to sleep in his own arms, and soon they were all snoring and sighing except for the fisherman, who tried and tried to silence the sound of the breached ocean and erase the sight of that impossible woman from his memory, and after he had tried for an hour, his younger daughter woke up and said, Daddy, why are you crying, and he whispered after glancing at his still-sleeping wife, Daddy isn’t, he jess has some salt in his eyes, and when he gets a good night sleep, he will be fine, jess fine, better than ever.

3 Viola and the Passing of the Ghost Train

I still can’t hear any damn train Violet Closebloom whose real name was Viola Cosbum said to Émile Erhard with a flail of her arms and reddening eyes under the blue swath of moon for they had gone to the beach to make love and hear the famous ghostly train that had become famous when the prime minister suddenly became able to hear it and soon everyone in the world or at least everyone on the island could hear it everyone but Violet Closebloom and it made her want to run across the wave crests tugging at her hair like a trichotillomaniac gorgon because Émile the asshole could see it and he was pointing with the still eyes of someone witnessing the impossible or as he’d said There it is look I can see it on the water Vy-vy can you see it I dunno if I’m going mad hey are you okay well obviously she wasn’t because they hadn’t been able to make love much less both see phantasmal locomotives because the goddamn crabs had come up from their holes in the sand and from under the sea-grape trees first one crab then two crabs then seven had come and it shouldn’t have been much more than annoyance because they were soldier crabs in teeny wizard hats of shells but Violet had screamed when she saw them and tried to move but Émile must have thought he was simply doing the job better than usual because he pulled her back to him and kissed her nape right where she’d tied her hair up like a geisha and by then the crabs were swarming over her legs and she was kicking and shrieking and Émile still had no idea what was going on but that snake oil he’d bought from his brother who had bought it from a Carib obeah man must have really had all the aphrodisiacal excellence it had promised in a post-it label on the bottle and the more she cried out the better he felt until she told him to stop but by then her cries had drawn the attention of the great crabs beneath the sand and they’d had to evacuate as an exodus of red crustaceans with claws the size of coconuts had scuttled toward them like primeval spiders and after running down the beach with Violet wrapped in their towel and Émile clutching his genitals they sat breathless on a dune under the moon and it was then Émile saw the train oh that damn train well you see there had only been one railway on the island of Asphodel and it was now a rusty guano-slicked stop on pamphleted island tours after all it had only operated from 1910 to 1913 by the Rum & Cane Corporation Ltd so when people began going on about hearing the horns and chug-hissss-chug-chug-hissss of a great locomotive going by no one knew if those hearing the train were mad or if there were something demonic going on of course the priests of the island were called in but they dismissed it as superstition of all things

4 and it became another island legend like the legends all places even space stations and MMO communities have man you should have seen the prime minister he would put a hand to his ear at the end of some of his speeches to pretend he heard it and people would laugh which was good because everything he said was unfunny but nonetheless in recent months there had been a resurgence of interest in the legend because Father Dolt who was at least a century old claimed he had heard it himself and that it was no mere locomotive but a heavenly train in every sense of the word but only the spiritually privileged the elite could hear it and suddenly of course the prime minister could describe clearly each sound it made while the rest of the crowd struggled to hear and Violet cringed whenever she saw her coworkers at the coconut products factory putting hands to their ears So crude she would mutter So crude because Violet my gentle flower wanted so much to get the hell out of Asphodel and go to America maybe even Europe and yet she was stuck in a factory making fucking coconut soap and coconut cream the latter of which was actually good for fucking but regardless it was so insulting to her to have to live where she did which was the second floor of a three-floor rectangle of a building as gray and tall as a forgotten man’s epitaph it was all Violet and her mother a woman with a face wrinkled like a banyan and gentle eyes could afford and Violet could not hate her mother but she seemed to hate her anyway Violet hated such unpunctuated confinement hated living in a place where no one was open to anything from abroad unless it was from another Caribbean island though she had to admit the men were good at sex but she kept telling herself she would never go back to having sex with locals and then she’d found Émile who’d come from a French island but had been born in Treasure Island Florida and he was the smallest man she had ever been with and boy did he ever drone on and on in unending sentences but she simply retreated into herself as she had learnt to do being an only child a tactic that Émile could not argue about because she employed it even in arguments but he stayed with her he said she was the most beautiful woman in all the islands he’d lived in she was so light-skinned that she saw herself as a true foreigner in the mirror and that made her smile except her hair when unprocessed was a mass of dark springs and her lips and hips were so full and that drove Émile wild or so he claimed but she wanted to reduce both lips and hips also she’d made her hair straight as a Japanese woman’s at almost all times she could not be alone with herself too long though but had to be a one-girl parade and anyway if she was alone too too much even with her mother Violet would start to hear the chilling flap of invisible wings so she would stick to others and Émile had said he would go back to Treasure

5 Island one day when he got the money he was in Asphodel now because he had too much family here and while Violet thought that made no sense she waited and saved up none of her own money because it had to go towards keeping herself from looking like anything but difference in fact she even had to make extra money by giving her ex-boyfriends bedroom time when clueless Émile was off somewhere Why can’t you go somewhere with a name like that she’d said A name like what he’d replied with his umber face crinkling and she’d rejoined Forget it you’re just as in love with here as everyone else but all in all things had been going pretty well really supercalifragilisticexpialidociously I’d say or at least until everything had all gone downhill which was when Émile became able to sense the train like everyone else and soon Violet was the only one who could not hear or see it even little schoolchildren on the bus she took to work as they had no car were talking all about spectral obeah trains filled with Raphael cherubs with flapping wings and Violet had no one to hang around with except her boyfriend and ex- boyfriends oh how she hated herself for not being able to sense the train after that piece of shit Émile had been able to sense it for an entire week and I think she just wanted to prove to him and everyone that it was shit all a bunch of defecation they were getting excited about if the train even existed and you know what she thought it was probably just the typical mass hysteria of such people but anyway she had decided to combine a chance to see the train with sex on the beach and oh romantic sweetie Émile had brought a lovely French-looking blanket in the colors of the elusive Waldo and how wonderful the moonlight was it was like being on a distant island like Capri maybe oh fuck but then things had gone badly litotes and now the train was going across the water but Violet could neither see nor hear anything and in that moment she felt absolutely insane so she decided to really run across the water and she ran out far hahahaha she was going like Jesus or maybe like Mary Magdalene and then the next thing she knew she was on her back on the beach with a great sea urchin sticking out of her left foot and Émile was cradling her head and yelling at her Oh my God you stupid idiot why would you do that I’m sorry I love you I’m calling for help I think seawater helps let me put some on the cut and maybe it was the thing sticking out of her was it real but Violet knew then it didn’t matter if she ever saw the train through a tear in her chrysalis for she’d been running toward a ghost and what she did know was that, be it because of the thing in her or something else, she saw that there was nothing around her but dark, and she heard a faint sound, like harp strings on wind. It was an empty sound, the sound of a great unfilled world.

6 Dry, cool, dustlike—like the voice not of elegant Death but of Her little brother, a thing with no shadow. A connection she simply saw in her mind. It was pretty to Violet somehow. She blinked, and it occurred to her suddenly that there had never been a train to anyone but herself, and that the one with that sad empty voice was its conductor. A key, it seemed somehow, to life, a little oddity that would allow her to stand and spread herself far, wherever she was, to never be confined again. She realized after a moment she was stroking her chest like a stringed instrument. Oh, she thought. Um. And then she knew no more for a while, but it was just as well, for she wouldn’t have wanted to know anything more than that, and I don’t think she was ready for me to come myself just yet.

7 The Princess Nemona Takes a Walk

It is dark, or we are very deep down in the sea; it is sometimes difficult to be sure. Regardless, but especially if it is the latter, it is a dangerous time to walk outside, as the deadliest and strangest of monsters prefer the dark, and it is also easy to be detected by the crew, one of the few times they can detect something easily, since the floodlights are on outside the ship, though I must also admit the possibility that the guards have dozed off in their chairs or are playing cards or have retired to the bathroom to philosophize on the toilet or have found a concubine. But, nonetheless, if one can maneuver between the circles of yellow light, and can avoid the lit portholes that speckle our vast purple vessel, one has almost complete freedom. However, if the darkness is due to depth, one must also then contend with pressure, itself an uncompromising leviathan, and not even the most advanced walking suits can withstand the pressure at the deepest depths the ship descends to for more than a few minutes. Indeed, more than seven men and two women have died from exploding by staying out for a waterwalk too long; three missing children, still unaccounted for, may have gone out without attaching themselves to the ship and been blown away. Still, it is said that there is no lovelier feeling than that flirtation with death in the droning darkness; it may even be romantic, somehow, if you have another’s gloved hand in yours, and you feel Death’s little black fingernails on your napes. This must have been why the Princess Nemona sneaked down into the unloading cabin, where those who walk outside don their suits and weapons and wait to leave the ship. She had another person with her, which may be why she did not see me in the corner. As they descended in, I took in the faint fragrance of kelp tea, which they have perhaps just come from soaking in. Ah, that fragrance, jellyfishing through the room! A surreptitious inhalation, and my old bones feel like a young man’s again, my dreams feel less like dreams, for a moment…. I often sit in one of the holds after supper to compose my thoughts on the ship, the ocean, and what may have caused the great catastrophe that, according to the king, forced us underwater. It is a small gray rectangle of a room, accessed through a trapdoor-like mechanism in the floor and then by descending a twelve-foot beige ladder, and its set of waterwalker suits hanging on the wall like sloughed-off white skins and the brown and blue crates in the corners, as well as the bottles and old slips of paper and general flecks of litter—the whole effect is not of an unclean room, as most of the room is empty space, but of a tucked-away, or perhaps

8 discarded, space where one can disappear and reflect. My life prior to the submersible was never one where I had such time, at least not that I remember, since I became deeply ill at one point and then found myself underwater, so the king informed me, at least, and I have learnt, over the years, that not even my memories can necessarily be trusted. A philosopher on the side of the opposition says memory is all we ever have, and she (or he) who loses her memory loses herself. It is all the odder, since I sometimes have flashes of strange images just by speaking or writing, for I am occasionally using words that I have been given the meaning for without knowing precisely what they correspond to, their phenomena absent from the ship or the sea; the king, unwilling to create an entirely new language while emphasizing the world around us, has shared images of the surface with some of us, explaining some of the vocabulary, and yet what strange images he shows, violent slashes of color that dredge up nothing from the silt of my mind. Are they truly images of the surface? Am I so impaired? Surely, there was a surface—why else would we be here—but then again, are the fragments I can call up, like a vent blowing up bits of paper, reliable? Are they even mine? Of course, some who were born on the ship believe there is no surface, while a small faction seems to think the king a liar, but then they are silent when asked to explain why he would lie. His daughter, the lovely Nemona, evades the reporters’ questions, a tactic undoubtedly forced into her by her father, as he has finally allowed for democratic elections for a leader and must be regretting it. But what could he do? Hold it off any longer, and the masses would have taken him down themselves. Never mind that he is one of the designers of the ship, as well as the king, and to remove him, to chop off his head and feed his fat corpse to the sharks, as the fanatics put it, would lead to chaos and then, perhaps, to the destruction of us all. By the vitiating fumes of the sky, fanatics do not think, cannot think, I don’t think. That is how I got sick, according to the king—the world itself grew sick, due to extraordinary warfare and general vileness, politics much of it, the king having once been a senator himself running for President of a lost land, and then he had to flee, and the only encounter we have with the sky now is when we dock near the surface to collect and filter the air, and no one is allowed to come up to see anything. A conspiracy, the opposition cries, but it is for our safety, the king replies. The princess still has not seen me. If there is a sight I never want to forget, it is her in profile, just so, thick corkscrews of curls brushing her cheeks, nose a little wedge, mouth curved in a slight frown, body clad in the form-fitting white pajamas reserved for the royalty, and her

9 robe, pink as fire coral, is flung over her right shoulder; she must have removed it just before descending, perhaps due to the heat of the engines this low down, though it is almost inconceivable that a member of the royalty would move about outside clad in pajamas, peasant- like ones at that, a scandal in the making for the opposition if they got a hold of it. But, then again, our princess is a special one, and her frown is still somehow regal, I would say, lovely, lovely. Perhaps she is reflecting on what I have been reflecting on. Then she laughs at something the girl with her says, indicates the beige ladder to the brown door in the roof, and pulls off her shirt. I freeze. The other girl, who I recognize as Soledad Kinkade, is shutting an inch of door that was ajar. It makes an echoing grind, a sound that forces the girls to pause for a moment, tense smiles on their faces, hands holding their giggles in. I use the sound to make my escape, rolling with a flip behind a crate from where I can still observe my gorgeous serendipities, though there is also another sound and a sharp pain enters my leg, but I ignore it unless it becomes worse, as there is no blood yet in sight. I’m pleased at my stealth; it is almost as though I were the one about to walk out into the unknown. It is hard to believe Nemona is the king’s daughter. I have always been around her. When she was a baby, I sometimes held her and pointed out to her black-flecked gray eyes creatures and kelp forests passing outside the portholes. As a little girl, I once took her for a walk through the kitchen’s grand aquarium, where she found her pet dogfish. She went along, but she was always distant, almost sad, I sometimes thought, and yet I remember her sitting on my knee when she was at her plumpest as a girl and smiling at and twirling in her hands the starfish I had carved for her out of stone I found lying around the storage room, where I used to haunt until its darkness, stillness, and fishy odor became too much to bear; still, it was the thing in her hand and not the carver. I never felt drawn to her until she matured, though I always admired her for some reason; now, she seems an evolved wonder, true undersea royalty. But there is an immeasurable gap between us, not of that diaphanous thing called status or even just of age. It is obvious what it truly is, though I say nothing, lest I jeopardize the king’s election. I toy instead with turning around her name, rearranging its possibilities, my Nemmy, Mona, Nemonetta, so much more. I said she was royalty; and yet it is as if the Princess Nemona is two persons. How can I think otherwise, when there she is in front me in her peasant’s white leggings and a yellow-and- brown-spotted brassiere made from the fabric of seaweed and leopard seal, loose boy’s leggings

10 they seem at that, the commoner Soledad Kinkade at her side, ready to sneak out of the ship, cords around their waists, and float out in the black depths, stealthy as stingrays? If the princess is caught, there is no punishment for her, of course, unless a political enemy finds her instead of the guards. Soledad, on the other hand, will go to the holding cell for a day, possibly two, during which she will be given nothing but unfiltered seawater to drink. So strange. Who would guess who the princess is, any member of the royal family, really, out of their clothes? And that is precisely what I am seeing now, goodness, her long slender pink legs and a tiny green panty, hardly a panty at all, and when she turns, it might as well not be there at all, having vanished into her buttocks, though they are not vast by any means. Soledad is back now and smiles at her, then gives Nemona’s rear end a little slap, and the whitish flesh quivers. She tries to give the princess a kiss on the nose, but the latter shakes her head and whispers something, to which they chuckle and then head for the suits hanging on the wall. They are thick white suits, the helmet a round bit of glass that is a similar glass to what is used in the ship’s windows to withstand great pressure; atop the helmets is a small cylinder like a varec roll, which constitutes the headlamp; I have seen walkers carry secondary flashlights in their hands. Some also carry long cylindrical gray spear guns during special expeditions. Slim brown ankle boots and bulky gray gloves with a short knife in a hidden compartment complete the ensemble, but then there is also the sand-beige air tank, which is fitted on the back and from which emerges a black octopus of breathing apparati and an oval air gauge. Finally, there is the long white cord, which leads from the hold, I believe, and connects to the suit, so one is never entirely free. The suit must be zipped up the front, from crotch to neck an uneven black line; the girls check to make sure each one is closed up. There is a tense moment when Nemona’s helmet bumps Soledad’s as she bends to brush something off the front, pock, and then they laugh, their breath fogging up the glass for a moment. It is an excellently clear glass, though there are smudges on all of them, which is due, of course, to the indolence of the cleaning staff; they had their first strike a few days ago until they realized they would receive no increased pay and were inconveniencing even the opposition, who could not clean their clothes to save their political lives. Everyone wants to strike nowadays, but no one thinks of why they do something, of what will happen after the thing is done. And yet, there is something lovely in just the idea of protest, a romanticized, distant notion of it, perhaps, like a far-off patch of dark lit with bioluminescence.

11 The girls pause again, fingers upon their smiles, and then Nemona opens the next door by inserting a key into a wall and pressing a blue button on the wall. The royal family has its own key, as do the engineers; delinquents supposedly bribe the engineers, whereas Nemona likely borrowed the king’s, for he has only done it twice to my knowledge and will likely never again, unless he needs to escape. Another room beneath this one is revealed by a panel sliding away over the floor by the wall. It is this one the waterwalkers must enter to get outside. As the door opens, there is a hiss, and a faint mist of white steam jets out, filling the air around the girls with haze. They descend through the wall of vapor. And I now realize fully what is happening. All this time, I’ve known, of course, but I did not really know, did not consider what would happen after I took in all the wonders of the serendipity. Foolish, foolish. Me, of all people, letting my reason slip away, all the while I’m reasoning out other things…. I consider my options. I could run up to the girls, surprising them, and save them from their possible destruction. The ship appears to still be still, so a waterwalk would not be nearly as dangerous as if it were moving (though by this point, waterwalking has branched off to include the extreme sport the most intractable delinquents attempt, tugriding); but this only removes an additional difficulty from the possibility that the guards are alerted the moment the hatch into the open water is opened, which the girls will have to do once they descend into the hold. There is thus but a step, or about eight or nine literal steps, between me and stopping them. Certainly, there is a brand of heroism in stopping someone from doing something foolish. Often, one is disowned, discarded, or even physically abused in the immediate vicinity of the action; later, one may be rewarded in the most titillating of ways. On the other hand, a more immediate, and perhaps also lasting, reward can come from allowing the event to occur, as one becomes the kind of person who lets such things happen under his gaze. My gaze, however, is precisely the problem. From the moment I rolled over onto my ankle with a sharp sound perhaps not far removed from a fracture, I have been gazing at the girls without alerting them of my presence. This is frowned upon in the law books and is in fact punishable in the case of royalty. To let them know I have been there for about four minutes, feasting my eyes on their privacy, is tantamount to turning myself in for a crime, as well as perhaps the very thing that will remove those benefits I outlined above. The safest thing to do would be to do nothing, and then to appear, mayhap, when they return, if all has gone well; but

12 should guards be alerted, they will surely scour the entire room and discover me, at which point I will be placed under the most tenacious of suspicions. Of course, I have one other option, which is to run-skip-hobble to the ladder and try to escape up it without exciting any suspicion. I swallow. The girls have descended. I glance at the three other suits hanging on the wall. Then I realize the worst and best option of all. * I had almost expected the pressure of the water to simply obliterate me upon stepping out, despite all prior knowledge of previous successful expeditions into such conditions—not mine, mind you, since I have never done anything like this before. It is the difference between reflecting and the suddenness of doing, of course; the moment the thing becomes possible, theories and facts are tossed out the trash chute and crushed in their descent to the bottom by the ever-increasing pressure—a most ironic choice of image, though likely unavoidable. But no, the pressure is utterly impalpable in this hot, roomy, yet light attire; I am standing out in the semidarkness, half of my suit exposed to a weight far beyond my imagination, and my imagination knows some weights, let me tell you. I cannot resist looking up; but, of course, there is nothing but dark. Three soft greenish-yellow circles of light from the middle and upper regions of the ship, gently swishing back and forth like pendulums, illume the floor, and from them it is clear that there is very little floor indeed, for the lights, every four seconds, reveal a thin brown strip of rock, itself scarcely distinguishable from the abysses of black on either side. The stone walkway is freckled with sand that glints as the light passes over it; further on, in the one beam that is just slightly ahead of the other two, I can just make out the thrust of what may be a deep- sea vent; the optical structure of an extraordinarily vast monster, in which case the stone strip itself may be no more than some unspeakable tentacle; the remains of a beast that came upon such a monstrosity; the girls, horrifically transformed by distance; or, the king knows what, though I doubt the king would know, truth be told. The girls! Clearly, I did not actually forget about them, but in my momentary awe not only at the lovely-and-then-unnerving view of the abyssal darkness and the ledge-like structure, I lost my focus for a moment. Yes, let me readjust: the girls, by Queen Anemonia, where can they have gone, oh my, oh my. My perusal of the ledge-like formation betokens that we are not moving very fast, if at all, so it is indeed possible to waterwalk; however, when the ship stops so deep, it is only to collect items from the bottom or to extract chemicals; we will never remain down here

13 for too long, lest the strain on the ship be too great. In my fantasizing in the holding room, I appear to have greatly lost track of time—I haven’t the sandiest how long we’ve been down in these depths for. All the more reason that I must find the princess. Soledad—I cannot say I care for her sauciness, and she pales in comparison to the impregnable charms of my Nemona—but I am well-aware that to deliberately leave her behind, should such a heroic situation arise, would create an even more inaccessible set of walls between myself and the princess, and, really, I cannot really leave someone out here to die, least of all myself, which is to say that I must get a move on. Oh, the present tense is so bewildering. The girls must have gone down the ledge, but I have not seen the telltale sign of their journey in the swish of the lights, which would, of course, be the trails of their white attachment cords, eeling off into the darkness; however, the pendulous circles of yellow-green only briefly illumine spots of the ledge, and, naturally, the cords have left the ship, meaning, I would at least hope, that the girls have left with the cords, and, while I’m at it, how old I must seem even to myself to keep calling them by such an old man’s terminology, but that is perhaps relevant only in something I realize as I swallow and then squat down, as if to defecate, in preparation for placing myself on the thread of rock: my quest to find Nemona, as much as I love to see her as I did from my vantage behind the box, ah, yes, those soft pink thighs with, perhaps, just the finest hint of down at the top—what I meant to put down, ahem, was that you should not judge me for that. You would do the same, you beast, even if you chase after men or fishes or merpeople; Nemona has something for everyone, not literally, but in the best of ways. And it is not just that I will feel despondent if I lose the chance to extract such flitting pleasures by kissing her hand when I see her or spying on her as tonight, and it is not the case that I will move to some other nymph later. It is not that I fear—well, within reason—the king’s wrath if he finds I let them go. No. If I lose her, I think I will lose myself, much as that philosopher said of memory. * I had been walking on the ledge for nearly a minute, scrutinizing the sand on the ledge for bootprints or the slithering disordering to be expected from the attachment cords trailing them, my helmet lamp at full blast, luckless as I have always been at the king’s baroque casino (there is one of the words, explained by the king by reference to a set of paintings in his quarters), before I rediscovered the cords. Or a cord, at least. It had been trailing along the side of the cliff, it seemed, and where I happened to spy it was where I found a jutting snag of rock on the edge of

14 the ledge, around which a section of the cord had hooked, having, fortuitously, ballooned back up during some sudden downward movement and caught on the rock. This, of course, nearly gave me cardiac arrest. Had Nemona fallen off the ledge—Nemona and Soledad? I had seen no indications of their presence on the ledge; but then, I am not the ship’s detective, a position given to that sneering vile ass, Vulcan, and the current may have blown their trail away. Instinctively, I call out to them. But the fog of my breath briefly blinds me. Horror, vertigo—then the fog vanishes. I peer over the edge as far as I can after steadying myself. To my surprise, there are a series of little juts of stone, like a staircase into oblivion, located alongside the ledge, and the cord—one, mind you, a detail I just realized now—that has tangled descends down those natural steps. This does not prove she didn’t fall, but I wish to doubt it. As I look down at the steps, heart jellyfishing away, I glance back at the ship and wonder what I’m doing here. The ship is vast, though much of its silhouette is hidden in the dark; I am beyond the range of the swishing guard lights. Why, I wonder. Why did I come this far, can I even make it back along that ledge, will I have to crawl, will the ship suddenly lurch forward and precipitate me through the water at a violent pace, will some savage child descend into the hold and, using stolen machinery, attempt to slice the cords, is this the end! I must be the sea’s biggest fool, to have come out here like this. All because—well, it is almost as if I simply had no choice. I presented choices, but they were mere distractions, squirts of octopus ink: I had no choice but to follow, not to be led, but to follow. All throughout our lives, it is as if we are surrounded by invisible messengers giving us tasks and orders, not literal orders that will necessarily help or destroy us, but messages that force us to act in new ways lest we feel the crush of not having acted, as guilt is not what separates us from other animals but what so well defines us by its exaggerated presence in ourselves. I feel my helmet—no cracks, I don’t think—and tug the cord gently—secure, or still there, at least—and then I push off onto the first step. All this time, mind you, I have been dragging the foot I rolled on behind me; it is not broken, likely not fractured, either, but it pulses with a coral pain that is slowly extending up my thigh; more than that, the pressure tells me I must leave here soon, if not now, and yet I follow the invisible message instead. I have not stopped to think of the steps’ stability or even of the possibility that, here in the deep, the steps might really be eldritch nekton inscrutably designed to deceive such desperate jumpers—but they are indeed steps of stone, the first two, at least, and I am soon positively skipping down them,

15 after some brain-fevering moments on the first step where I was curled up like a fetus, aware that I am off the grid, so to speak, I’ve gone off the edge, the vessel is no longer precisely behind me. But, unless the cord I am following is an inexplicable deception or the remnant of a lost rogue waterwalker, I should soon be in the company of those I set off into the unlit depths to see. Which reminds me: what do I say when I meet them? What can I say? Of course, I can say nothing because of the helmets, hohoho, silly me. But speaking is but one way of saying. The steps soon grow farther and farther apart, though three are unusually close together. Continually, I am impressed by the silence. My helmet allows little sound in beyond my breathing, though there is a faint drone all around me, like thousands of little whispering beasts. And then something happens that makes me feel again the horror of where I am. All along, I have been following the white cord, at times holding it with my glove; as it threatened to flit out of my hand during a long one-footed hop between two of the ledge-steps, I gave the cord an unusual tug from the back, and then it suddenly came all into my hand without resistance, the whole zigzagging eel of cord, which I saw as I flashed the light behind me at the sudden change in tension. For a moment, I fear I’ve pulled the girl’s cord straight out of ship. But as I examine it in more detail, it becomes clear that the cord was not attached to the ship in the first place, or, rather, that it broke at some point during the girls’ walk. The part that had snagged along the uneven edge in the ledge and revealed itself to me was not connected back to the ship, for there is a complete tear in it just a few feet below where the curve of the snag is still visible; although I cannot rule out that I tore the cord myself, what is more likely is that Nemona did not—or perhaps it was Soledad, precipitous being—realize it had snagged on the ledge and simply kept going, at which point it ripped. I tug my own rope behind me gently, then firmly. If my postulation is accurate, I will still be led to one of the girls by following the rope. Briefly, I smile at the overtness of the idea and give the cord a great tug. Surely I can just pull her back up to me rather than descending into these depths—but then I realize I may in fact lose her by doing this, if the cord has snagged again lower down, and I may be severing our connection entirely. This is coupled with the fact I have also just remembered: this is a single cord, and there are supposedly two of them down there at some point on this uncanny stairway into the unknown; where is the other cord? Surely I would have seen it by now if it were connected to the ship—unless, of course, it too has broken off, or the cord in my hand in fact

16 leads to nothing, or—the thought suddenly strikes me like a mako shark rushing toward its hapless prey—there has been foul play. I swallow. How long have I been down here for? I cannot stay down much longer, surely. I feel my helmet again, then shine my secondary wrist light on it; the light blinds me, but in it I have seen something I did not want to: a faint line running through the glass like a vein. It cannot be a crack, or I would be dead; it may have been my own fevered imagination, or the fetus of a crack, perhaps, Death scribbling on my helmet with her fingernail; and then I see an extraordinary image, a smiling being with blue corkscrewing hair and black nails and skin whiter than any beluga. She grins at me in my vision of a moment, which is gone as I shake my head; but what has struck me is that her face was precisely that of the princess’. I lean back against the rock wall for a moment, heart thudding. Heart thudding—how much air do I even have remaining? Almost out of the yellow into the red zone—some minutes. Thank goodness the air is not distributed along the cords, or the girls would both be dead. The cords back to the ship—mine will be my way back, but it now occurs to me that the steps are so far apart in spaces that to climb back up them will be almost impossible, unless I can swim, which is difficult in this heavy suit. I cannot even see our ship in the distance anymore. Damn it! Why was I such an abnormal fool as to hide out in the waterwalkers’ room to think, couldn’t I just stay in my cramped cabin like everyone else, or sip oblivion from essence of sea urchin in the bar like the other lost beings on our ship, but no, I had to be in the place where this happened, and I had to end up here, where I have realized, for the first time, that I will likely die, that the girls I am chasing are likely dead, will-o-the-currents, the bioluminescent flickers of fish long dead. I have done nothing, I suddenly realize. I am about to die down here, where no one will find me if my cord should sever from the ship, probably already has, and no one will remember me, not even the king. How many days will it take for someone to realize I’m missing? Will they ever? The princess—if she were to return somehow without me, would she even remember my time with her when she was a girl? Would she notice I was no longer there? Why have I lived? And then another possibility hits me, and this is the most horrifying of them all. The girls have gone back to the ship, which is why there is no second cord; this first cord is the result of an accident that is no longer relevant. If I pull up the rope, snag or no snag below me, I will find nothing, for it has long been disconnected from her.

17 I shake my head. Absurd—I would surely have seen them come back, and how could the cord disconnect from her like that? At any rate, these are all the fluttering speculations of a ghostly fool, a still-living corpse, the kind of thing that needs another’s blood to possess color. A long moment passes; and then I shine my light forward, and leap down to the next step, following the cord down into the darkness. In the back of my mind, I see the blue-haired being smile, eyes soft, tender, and cavernous with sadness. * The steps terminate suddenly onto a wide expanse of rough brown ground. My landing and my subsequent steps send up wraiths of silt and ghostlike white fishes shaped like sperm. Perhaps my step was hard; I felt something like a tremor underfoot. At my left, a collection of white, long-dead tubeworms and the skeletons of thousands of shrimp over the now-silent chimney of a hydrothermal vent, like a vase of fossils. The expanse is little more than a plain of silt except for the stones sticking out of it like teeth, and for some reason their formation make me uneasy, though I cannot quite reason why. In the distance in front me, I see a vast range of jagged chimneys spewing black smoke, chimneys larger and more terrible than anything I have ever glimpsed from my window. All around me, I see the translucent fishes stirring up the skeletons of things gathered around hydrothermal vents that have long stopped flowing. Though the suit still prevents me from feeling anything but a dull coolness in my bones, I sense distinctly that I am elsewhere, that I am far from where I find myself in my memories, and I once again pause to wonder, though without so many words, more likely, how a cnidarian being like myself has left his windowsill, his silent escape space by the waterwalkers’ suits, and ended up here. The cord leads straight across this dusty plain of quiet volcanoes. I follow it for almost half a minute, my entire body trembling. I am at almost at a run, in fact, before I come to the next thing that shocks me: an enormous crater in the center of the plain, oblong and filled with clouds of dark smoke. The ground shakes again beneath my feet, and it is then I understand. It’s also then I see the girls, finally. I almost don’t see them, my light flitting over the crater’s perimeter. On a short ledge leading into the crater’s fuming fathoms, I see both of them, one kneeling over the prostrate body of the other, her helmeted head in the other’s gloved hands. The one kneeling is the one whose attachment I have been tracing; the other’s cord is nowhere in sight. Briefly, I freeze, unsure of what to do; and then I race toward them, almost reaching the ledge over the crater before my body is stopped in its tracks. I fall back. My cord! Either it’s

18 snagged or it’s at the end of its line. I reach a hand out to them, and the girl who is kneeling stares at me, I think she does, anyway, the anonymity of those helmets, and then she comes toward me slowly, dragging the body of the other girl. It must be heavy, however, and that is why she has not made progress back. She jerks a hand toward me. Yes. I’ll come. And then I realize I am not only not making progress forward no matter how hard I tug, but am actually now moving backward. What? I’ve detected no current as yet; the only other possibility is that something is pulling my cord, and if so, it is either the ship moving or someone who has discovered our journey and is reeling us back—although my cord is the only one that will decidedly bring back a person. I have not come this far to fail now, and yet, as the force pulling me from them slowly increases, the silt beneath my boots stirring up dusty walls between me and them, I know I have lost, that I have lost more than I could have ever imagined losing by dying alone down here, and in my madness, I reach for my helmet, determined that I should pull it off and shout in the brief moment before obliteration that I have come, me, I think I love you, and it will be enough, for the truly crushing pressure will be to return to the ship without Nemona, without them both, and to have to live seeing what I have seen. Then I remember the knife. It is not clear to me, nothing is clear to me right now, but what seemed most sensible in that unceremonious moment was to take my knife and slash at the cord that was dragging me back, dimly aware that it would be tugged away out of sight and I might forever lose my chance to return alive, that the frenzied slashings cost me air from my tank—but what of life like this, life equated with breaths? Somehow, amidst the silt in the water and the pounding in my head and the thickness of the rope, I cut the cord away, and then I’m suddenly adrift. I swim-walk over to the girls after regaining my balance, the mobile one of whom is staring at me silently—well, she could not stare otherwise, but somehow I do not think she would be saying anything if she could, this being a silence I could feel. It made me briefly feel culpable of some crime. When I get near enough, I see between the smudges of silt that the girl is none other than the princess herself, and flushed in with my relief is the sense that I do not know how to respond to her, to explain myself, does she even remember who I am, and then I remember I cannot speak, anyway, so I move quickly to Soledad’s body, which I hope is not a corpse.

19 I try pulling her, as the princess had done; I can drag her body slowly, but it will not do for the ascent back up to the ledge. Something, her air tank, mayhap, is terribly heavy. I turn her over, and that’s when I see her air is in the red zone; without thinking, I grab Nemona’s, my face blushing as red as her air gauge level, and then I glance at her helmet, rendered almost faceless in the angle of the harsh glow, and drop the air gauge. She glances at me, silent as ever, and I feel ashamed for some reason, rebuffed and punched by her silence, even if she must be so. What I do know, as I look at my own gauge, is that we are all minutes away from drowning. A crack tears me from these thoughts. I look first at Soledad, then at Nemona, then remember I cannot hear the outside world that well. I’m still alive, so I have no life to waste looking for a crack on my helmet. After a moment’s hesitation, I bend down, lift Soledad’s head, then bosom, onto my knee, then cradle my arm around her chest and lift her. Nemona helps, touching the girl gently. Soledad is surprisingly heavy—the air tank, likely—but I can carry her like this, I think. I think of hoisting her on my shoulder, but I could not jump so, and if she disturbed my air tank, we would both end up lost. The girl so positioned, I turn to Nemona, but to my surprise and faint dismay, she is already at the stone steps, indicating with her jerking glove that I follow. I swallow, then step forward, grimacing at the sudden return of pain in my leg, likely due to the increased weight on it. I pause, going back down to a knee, then realize I cannot do such stunts without risking damaging Soledad’s suit beyond repair. I do not want her to be hurt; just the fact that she is under my arms somehow shifts all weights, Death’s footfalls and scribbles the bringer-together of all. I try walking again once she is repositioned under my arm, switch to hopping on one leg, and then hop as fast as I can, the tank smacking my back painfully. By the time I reach the steps, I feel a dull pain in my ears and a gong seems to reverberate inside my skull. The steps. To leap up each step with this body under my arms, this body that I do not even know is alive…but the princess is there a few steps up, and she is beckoning, yet how little she looks like my Nemona in that suit, I wonder if she is even the princess—but a glance reconfirms who I am holding. And yet I feel lost. I stare with my headlamp up the trail of ledge-stairs I’ve come down and I cannot even remember how I did it, if I even did. How did I do it? How could I? Why? Ah, yes….and yet I must go back up, and once we are up, will the ship still be there, and will they notice me in their lights at all….They must. I know it. I have come; I will return, and they will know.

20 With a deep breath and a few steps back, I run to the first step, hesitate, go back again, and then finally hop-run and leap onto it, landing near its edge—but landing. The figure above, ah, Nemona, her name momentarily lost, beckons; I had almost lost sight of her. As I land on the fifth step up from the bottom, the widest so far, I suddenly feel a terrible gong in my head again. Soledad must have dropped from my arms because I also felt light as air. From there, all I remember is a faint blue smile before collapsing, everything the dark of the water around me. * Logically, if unexpectedly, I awoke in a jail cell. It seems we were rescued by someone who saw the princess descend into the hatch; a team was dispatched to investigate her authority for waterwalking, the guards utterly unaware of any of it, and because of my unceremonious presence, the girls’ venture swiftly became something they were forced to do under my command. I learnt much of this after waking up, but when I did, I did nothing to deny it. It warmed me, made me smile involuntarily, when I discovered that both girls insisted I had nothing to do with it and that I had tried to save them— well, at first, anyway, as their story quickly changed once the king was accused of laxity and corruption, after which I once more became a despicable and insane villain destined to kill off everyone by a descent into the Empedocles Fumarole. As much as it hurts me that I must face a trial and probably receive the most savage of punishments for these absurd extrapolations, I refused to waver from day one of my returning consciousness, when I found the princess and her Soledad in my cell, hand in hand, and both devoured me with hugs and kisses on the nose and cheeks. It was so sudden that I thought I was hallucinating before dying and it was only when they had left that I realized I was likely still alive. Thank you, both said to me, and I remember asking what for, and Nemona replied, For saving us, silly. You gave all of us another chance, and you didn’t tell anyone what you saw. I did all that, I asked. And Soledad nodded and rejoined with the thing that made me remember her face more than the princess’ in these last days, during which I have been composing, We’ll never forget you, dear sir. But of course I told them they were silly and I had done nothing at all and that forgetting is often the best thing we can do to keep ourselves happy and sane. They had chuckled and left, hand in hand as they had been nearly the whole time they spoke, vowing to come see me again often, but I have only seen them walk by and wave three

21 times in the week I think I’ve been here, and it is better than I hoped, since this jail cell for one is truly my kind of architecture, my spirit’s emanation, the place I can be as I must. And, much as their distance tears, I now know I need it; I cannot bear to be in something so overwhelming as their presence. Memories are all we need, the philosopher should have added, and then space, and Death’s scribbling on our glass.

22 Hyper Manicou plus Elliot versus Destroyer of Universes

The giant opossum walked in while Elliot Rolle was playing a videogame. The game was a platformer in which a giant creature, some kind of mammal, moved between 2D side-scrolling and fully 3D stages. It was hard but addictive enough for Elliot not only to have been playing it instead of Call of Duty but for him to not notice the giant opossum. His house, a tall rectangle of cement-gray and peeling green just beyond a patch of forest, was always open in the day. People often just walked in. Stray dogs once in a while. But he only realized he had company when the opossum began to speak. “Good afternoon,” the marsupial said in a deep, slow, and scholarly voice, bowing and clicking its claws. It was taller than Elliot, who was six foot two, since it was standing on its hind legs. It smelled like fruits, just like his mother’s Garnier Fructis conditioner. “What the mother’s ass—what—” Elliot fell out of his plastic chair onto the tile floor with a thud. His fall yanked out the USB cable and the PS3 controller, which had been charging. He looked at the opossum, swallowed, blinked, and then looked around the piece of house he could see. It was sort of dark because the windows in the front were closed and it was a dull orange three in the afternoon. No one else was in the house. In the brief silence, all he heard was his heartbeat and the gurgle of the river out back by the old aqueduct. He began inching back, slowly getting to his feet and looking around for a weapon. His hands were still clenched around the controller. “What in the hell you supposed to be,” Elliot murmured as the marsupial watched him, making a quick sign of the cross as he finally got to his feet. He suddenly found himself pressed against the wall. “A chupacabra or what?” “No, no. I am sorry to bother you like this, Elliot Rolle,” the opossum said, snout drooping slightly. “I know I must appear very strange to you. But please believe me: I am neither a demon nor a figment of your imagination. I am a real opossum, what you call ‘manicou.’ I am simply a talking creature from another universe very close to this one, in which creatures like myself are not uncommon.” There was a pause, during which Elliot stared at it with widened eyes. “If you are wondering why I have come here now….Yes, well, I am here, Elliot Rolle, because you and I have a mission to fulfill.” His sudden involvement in the speech jolted him. “A mission?”

23 “Yes,” the opossum replied, speaking a little faster now. It had a naturally grinning face but now it seemed to be smiling. “We must save this planet from a terrible being known as Relty. It is a dangerous force that takes delight in destroying planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, black holes, quasars, and, if it can, entire universes. I have come,” the tall marsupial said with a voice so suddenly low that Elliot had to tilt his head forward to hear, “because Relty has entered your universe already.” “Relty.” “I know, I know. But you must believe me, Elliot Rolle. You are in great danger. The entire planet, and possibly other planets in the universe, if not the whole universe itself, is in danger. You and I must stop it from occurring by denying Relty access to Earth.” The opossum sighed. “This is a lot to take in, Elliot Rolle. You did not even know of the existence of other universes prior to my arrival. Let me give you a few moments to think while I prepare some iced Nesquik with a dash of cinnamon and a shot of rum for you.” The opossum disappeared around the corner, now on four legs, into the little green kitchen and opened the fridge. Elliot was staring with an open mouth. It knew what his boredom drink was. Was it someone in a suit playing a prank on him, he’d wondered early on, but it seemed impossible. The voice was like nothing he had heard before. And it had moved like only a manicou could around the corner. He considered going into the kitchen after it, then sat back down and turned off the PS3 and the TV. He checked his phone but there were no texts, no calls. He suddenly got up and went to the open window and looked around, but there was no one in sight, and he couldn’t hear anyone snickering behind the aqueduct or moving around upstairs. If he wasn’t in a tiny island, he would be looking around for video cameras. “There is no one else,” the opossum said from the kitchen. Elliot whirled around. It was still out of sight, preparing his drink. “Uh-huh,” he said, walking back over the pale green tiles and then the small red carpet to the black plastic chair. He leaned back, listening as the creature stirred a spoon in a glass. “What the shit,” he said to himself, chuckling. * Elliot often wore a black fitted hat with the red Superman S emblazoned across it, as the girls seemed to delight in a man who knew just enough about nerdy things to be funny and not embarrassing, and indeed the girls of the island knew him well because for years he and his older

24 brother Marcus when Marcus was back down from Boston where he went to college had been everywhere on the island, at every fete showered with fireworks and with speakers as tall as motels that deafened children and at every dance in black and blue clubs and at every get- together wherever people were getting together (you might well have thought they made copies of themselves, like the sorcerer’s apprentice made of his brooms, and distributed them across the stifling green land), and it was little slight on Elliot’s appearance that he had been known as Nightcrawler when he was in second form. His real name he pronounced with a laugh and deliberate attempt at a lisp. Jah, he would say. I sounding like a gay rat. His nickname was a bit ironic, as he had become fat from all the Heineken beer and the going nowhere, and suffered from poor circulation in his chunky thighs; he disappeared only into the depths of his home and through the days that led to nowhere, spending most of his time in the living room playing games under the stillness of the hot afternoons and swatting at the mosquitoes that bred in the stagnant puddles on the sheets of asbestos left to rust in the patch of jungle outside and texting every once in a while whichever two or three girls he claimed to be in a relationship with at the time. But even the disingenuous sex on nights when he told one girl he was sick or in the shower when no one was home had become ephemeral, routine. He could still get drunk off someone’s absinthe and get high off the potent weed he shared from a Rasta up in the hills and he could still learn a new dancehall dance from Jamaica to use on a girl in the club but even those had begun to lose their luster, scheduled dips into a diluted Lethe. Some days, the windless heat was so heavy that he just retired up the crumbling stone steps across from where he played his games, feet kicking up clods of brown, and half-sleepwalked through the cavernous hallway to his room and closed his brown blinds and disappeared under the breeze of the loud metal fan that pushed away the mosquitoes, lost within that stone house that was white as a skull. Bizarre. He felt as though he were becoming a crystal, a statue, Galatea in reverse, as if a soporific thing had bloomed inside him and was slowly colonizing his entire being. The endless women of former years had become dull, ragged things, coats on racks, coats on ghosts. But there was nothing for him to do but continue on, day through week through month through day. The island’s college was a pathetic disaster where teachers taught the wrong classes whenever they remembered to wake up and students made pornos in the classrooms at night that stank of mold and high-grade ganja. There was no money for him to go to college overseas like Marcus because his brother had gone on one of the government’s suspicious scholarships and

25 Elliot knew he would never get one himself and his mother was the only one with a job, chef at a vanishing hotel, and Elliot would grin and tell his mother he was going to become a hermit in the wilderness outside their house, as they lived just below a neighborhood outside of the capital city and the jungle towered over their house with the disquieting dimensions of a painting by Henri Rousseau. Sometimes he took the breadknife out of the drawer when the maid was making lunch and said with a crooked grin that he was going to kill himself, right then and there, and if Allah was right and God was wrong, he might get some sympathy virgins, or if he went to hell, fire- bitches. And when the maid glared and told him to put down the knife and behave, he cackled and rubbed its serrated edge slowly against his throat until the maid leaped out at him and he told her with the same grin that she was trying to get him killed. Then he would tell her to make him a hotdog or a cucumber sandwich. There was nothing for him, he knew, no money, nothing in the stars or on the Earth or in the mist and smoke between, nada to nada in thy Nada’s name; he had had a job as a bagboy and then as a packer at the main supermarket in town for five months, but he had been fired when he got into a fight with a scowling older man on staff because the man said his mother was a fool for letting him run around like a wild beast and for his being a member of that gang of hoodlums, though Elliot hadn’t actually been involved with Goon Squad for over a year. It ended when Elliot knocked him out with a frozen brisket to the head. The man hadn’t pressed charges but he told Elliot he would call the police if he so much as approached him in the street again, and Elliot had cackled in his face. Observe: desolate and absurd as he seemed to himself, he was also proud, and anyone who tried well enough to attack that he would beat down, no matter how big or small they were, be it man, boy, woman, girl, creature. I and I, he would say. All that shit mean is me alone that giving a shit about me. * The opossum told him that their attempt to stop Relty had to take place tomorrow. Relty was fast, he said, and he would make it to Earth soon. The only way to stop him: block his passage or send him to another universe. The opossum had already alerted the authorities. They would be on their way. But he had had a difficult time convincing them, and only a fraction of their interuniversal squad was coming. They used transportation stations set up across the planet, unbeknownst to most of its inhabitants. Their best bet, then, was to weaken him, then warp him into a dangerous universe from which he would not quickly escape.

26 “I am an agent,” the opossum said. “Though I look like a wild animal, I am a specially trained and powerful officer. I have done battle with Relty once before.” “Why me?” Elliot asked. “Relty will begin by destroying individual pieces of land on a planet,” the officer opossum explained. “In two parallel worlds where we stopped him, he began by destroying your island. You did not exist there. I think there is something about how your island is shaped that delights him. He is a sick entity.” “You still haven’t answered the question.” “Ah, yes. Well, Elliot Rolle, you are special. I have watched you for very long. You are full of anger, yet you can control it. You have become cold on the surface, which is good for battle. You do not see a future, and yet you will decide to help me stop Relty to save your future. All that may seem quite absurd,” the creature added, “but you must understand that some people in this world are simply better than others, and so I have chosen you.” The battle was to be in the evening. If it went into the night, all would be lost, unless the other officers showed up. Elliot asked if they were manicous like him but he just got a soft laugh in reply. The opossum had a device that could capture Relty in a little box. It was tiny and green but contained an enormous room inside it somehow. TSARDISK Penitentiary, it was called. Once captured, the opossum would have to flee to a special government transportation station, deposit it onto a train that went to a forbidden universe, and let both train and device disappear. Otherwise, Relty would escape from the box because he was so strong. Elliot’s job was to provide backup support and also to act as bait. Relty loved touching and examining complex life forms as much as he liked destroying them. If Relty did not try to touch him, he would use a powerful set of speakers to blast a volley of sounds Relty did not care for. He would be wearing a spacesuit that looked like a scuba diver’s dry suit. “Okay, hold up. What the hell is Relty?” Elliot said. “Ah,” the officer replied. “That I cannot explain. Relty simply is, even more than you and me.” * He told no one about the opossum after it left; he could not even play any games because his mind felt stuck in another dimension, one it could hardly descend from, or ascend from, or slip crabwise from. It was as though he had stepped out of a TV screen into another world

27 entirely, or out of the Rothko colors he had been unwittingly living in and into hundreds of new palettes, or perhaps he had gone into an inscrutable painting and found it contained the truth all along, and whatever the case it was as if the world had been filled with the sea again and he had returned to a former life as a savage ichthyosaur or an Ediacarian jellyfish, not that he knew what either was but the feeling was the same. Different ways of conveying a life. He had not given up on the idea he was mad. It was a perfect idea, he thought in the dark with a savage grin, and what better manifestation of it than a manicou saving the world. And even if it was a delusion, the misty planet he lived on would still come to an end when he did, and no one on Earth would notice for more than moments, well, no one but his mother, and he did not want her to cry, the exhausted woman, but her life would be easier without him, and what the hell, he wasn’t really going to die because none of this had happened, although it probably well had. At any rate, Marcus hadn’t come down this summer, had gotten an IT job in New Jersey, his friends were too gullible and too skeptical, and his mother would just think he was possessed, and he laughed at the thought that he probably really was, yes, how perfect, he was possessed by a demon rat. These thoughts and the blanket of heat and what felt like thousands of pins and needles in his legs kept him from sleeping most of the night. The day of the mission was fog and rain. He could see nothing of the Caribbean Sea or the line of shacks down the sloping road from his house, and tendrils of gray and formless things were creeping up the road. It was cool with the rain and yet he had woken up in a feverish sweat unaware that he had ever been asleep. And then he remembered his dream, or perhaps he invented one: a Frenchman he had never seen before had told him that if there was no god, people would inevitably invent one; and then the Frenchman dissolved into an Argentinian man reading a map of a country that was the precise size, shape, and design of that country, and he turned and said, It may be possible to invent a reality that is exactly the same as reality. He was surrounded by hundreds of little girls holding fat spiral lollipops that seemed like kaleidoscopes. * Well, time to go. The evening was kicking off her blue bedcover and the world was purple and faintly misty and glittering with early stars like a patch from Miles Davis’ version of Concierto de Aranjuez or, what came to him for some reason, Bob Marley’s Sun is Shining. He swallowed, sucked his teeth, cursed, then suddenly cackled so loud that it bounced off the walls like a poltergeist, and then he set out in his checkered dress shirt, not buttoned, his gold chain

28 with a crucifix, old black jeans, and basketball shoes. In his pocket, a scarlet-painted switchblade his father had carved many years ago, when he had still been in the island. Maybe I go use it on that damn manicou itself, he thought with a grin and shake of the head. He paused as he stepped towards the mist, still creeping up the roads like some misplaced nebula. “Shit,” he said to himself. Shudder down his back, flash of heat on his neck. He looked up—same stars as ever—then behind him. And then he stepped into the mist. After a moment, he was back in the clear; the mist was not as thick as it had seemed. When he turned back, it had almost vanished up the road and into the forest. As he walked down the road, looking for whatever signal he was supposed to receive and wondering what the hell was wrong with him, he heard steps behind him. He turned. A girl whose face he vaguely remembered appeared for a moment before he felt something cold and then burning in his chest. He looked down. She had stabbed him with an enormous breadknife, and she was pulling it out with a zigzagging motion. She was wearing the crimson bandana he had worn himself when he was on a mission with the Goon Squad. “What—girl—girl, what the fuh—urgh—” His face crinkled up. He could barely speak. The girl suddenly delivered a hard roundhouse kick to his sternum and he fell to his back. The girl smiled. She was beautiful, her large lips glittering with brown gloss, her dark eyes lined like an Egyptian’s, her mango-cream skin smooth and softly aglow in the purple-red light that was burning into soot. Her tight shimmering black curls were half in a ponytail, half down to her neck. She was slim and had the widest curving hips and largest ass in a pair of skinny jeans he had ever seen on a girl her size. He could see a patch of skin where her pale green tank top had rolled back up from her jeans. She raised the knife again and bent over him, glossy smile widening. He knew her, but who was she? Why couldn’t he remember? She began stroking his cheeks with her palm, then his neck, which sent a frisson through his body, and he suddenly wanted to grab her and push her down and have sex with her right then and there on the asphalt and grass with the gaping cut in his side, yes, with that big bloody wound that had sent hot cracks through his body. But he couldn’t even lift an arm. He was frozen. She licked the rim of her bottom lip. *

29 He awoke in a wooden room he had never seen. It was small and brown with an ochre bulb dangling from the ceiling, around which orbited a wild asteroid belt of little moths. There was also a white light on a short bedside table beside him, a fat lamp in a chartreuse lampshade, and it was only as he saw it he realized he was in a bed. It was a small cot that screeched as he leaned back. He swallowed, looking at the damp sheets, and then he remembered the girl. Her face floated up from the silt of his memories in a moment, perfectly formed. His own squad….As he put his hand on his chest where he remembered being stabbed, a man walked into the room. “Ah, you’re up,” he said. He was a tall light brown man with whitening hair and the weathered cheeks of a man accustomed to life at sea. He had on a shirt covered with Hawaiian flowers of every color Elliot could imagine. “Where am I,” he said after looking over the man to see if he recognized him. “This is the back of my dive shop,” the man said. “Carib Dive.” “Dive shop? What? Wait, what day is it?” “Tuesday.” “In what month?” The man smiled faintly. He told him the month. Elliot glared at the white bed. “I missed it….Oh, shit, wait. We—nothing didn’t happen to the island?” He wished he had taken it back as he asked it, but it had come out as he thought it. “Like what?” “No, never mind.” He swallowed. “So how did I end up here?” “You were lying on the edge of the road. A car almost ran you over but luckily for you, it was someone who took the time to stop and get out. She took you to my shop because the hospital was too far and I was just closing the gates. You lucky you have a friend like that.” He winked. “A friend like what?” “A pretty girl. Big, big hips, light skin, had on a bandana…” He grinned. “You should call her up when you get out of here.” “What the hell going on…but so you treated my wound, then….I not feeling anything in my chest.” The man frowned for the first time. “What wound?”

30 Elliot chuckled darkly. “That same girl you just describe put a big breadknife in my chest. Why you think I was lying in the road? For kicks?” The man moved toward him, then stopped just before the bed. He smiled again. “I just thought you were drunk. The girl seemed to think you were in a coma. You were completely out of this world, mumbling strange things to yourself…and then you started shouting and crying out last night in pain and I thought something was wrong with you, but nah, man, you’re fine. Not a scratch on you. Believe me. This is part of the medical facility I have at the back of my shop, and I checked you out well when the girl brought you.” He shook his head. “Damn strong girl, too…dunno how she dragged you.” He slapped Elliot’s shoulder. Normally, Elliot would have told him to touch him again if he wanted his balls in his stomach. But he felt powerless again, as he remembered he had when the girl stabbed him. He felt his chest, and the man was right: nothing there, not even stitches. “But garcon,” Elliot said. “I felt the girl stab me. That couldn’t have been a dream.” The man cocked one eyebrow up slightly. “Dreams can be strong. Maybe it was all those shooting stars, though…what, you didn’t see them! Oh, I suppose it was after you were brought in. Yeah, man, what a show, haven’t seen something like that in a good while, and my mother was all thinking the world was ending, it was so many of them…but yeah. “Anyway, my boy. Your mother knows you here, and she’ll probably be passing here soon after she gets off work, so you can go when she comes if you feel up to it, or you can go now, unless you need a drink or something. You must be thirsty.” “Um, yeah…go get me something. Please. Just some water.” The man chuckled and left. Elliot leaned back against the wall. “What the shit,” he said to himself. * The opossum returned three days later, when Elliot was chopping a path through the razor grass and bush in the patch of wilderness outside their stone house. He had suddenly felt like cutting something down, transforming how the place looked. So he had taken the cutlass and mutilated the young yellow bamboos and the grass and put gashes in the big mango trees. Later that night, he was going to take a girl into a clearing he would make and see how it felt to do it under the stars.

31 “Sorry I took so long,” the opossum said. It was covered in slime and glittering dust the color of nebulas. “It was a much longer journey to get Relty, trapped in the TSARDISK unit, sent off to a ravaged universe. And we could not send him to where we wanted to. So much—” he paused, falling to all fours, panting and wheezing. “Pardon me,” he said. “So much bureaucracy, like you would not believe, for such a thing….What a crazy world.” “Get away from me,” Elliot said, turning back to the bamboo was slicing. “What? Elliot Rolle, you should be proud to see me, as I am to see you, still strong and healthy. You did an amazing job with me up there, wearing my spacesuit and letting Relty get close to you, and Relty kept shifting shapes, and at one point I thought he had you because you got a gleam in your eye, but no, you turned on that speaker and blasted him away, and then I caught him in the moment his shield went down. I had to release all of my power, and no matter how I clawed at him, he simply regenerated himself, and at one point, he looked just like me, and I thought I was mad, but you did your job to distract him then. It took us almost the entire night to get to that point, Elliot Rolle—” he stopped again to catch his breath on all fours—“but we did it, friend, we saved it all, we will be heroes of war in the Interworld Gallery of Greats….” Elliot turned around slowly, whirling the cutlass. He touched the blade with his finger. He felt he should have been grinning, but the grin wouldn’t come. “We really did all that, eh.” “I know you do not believe me,” the opossum said. “My only question is why you believe someone else, when I am here before you telling you you have become a hero, a savior….” He wheezed. “Excuse me, Elliot Rolle….I just need to rest for a bit, but before I do…Let me extend an offer, what I came for…an offer for you to come with me, friend, to my universe, where we can fight dangers together…Let’s leave here behind. I have much to teach you, but you have potential….Ah…you can let me know what you wish when I wake back up…I feel so weak all of a sudden. Good day, friend….” And with that he curled up in a circle on the cut grass and was snoring within a minute, tail curled around his great glitter-spattered slimy sweat-reeking bulk. Elliot walked up to the manicou without a word, eyes wide, and then he lifted the cutlass and drove it deep inside its skull, once, twice, three times. He saw red, then white, then other colors. He stopped, a hand on his throbbing forehead, and then he flung the cutlass into the jaws of the jungle. After a moment, he stomped out, heart pounding, head flashing with migraine. He went to town for four hours to see who he found. On his way to the bus stop, he passed a little Indian girl holding a grand spiral lollipop in every color of the rainbow. He felt a

32 chill and suddenly turned around, but she was not looking at him, and he sucked his teeth and kept going. When he got back to his house, there was only a large pile of bones where the opossum had been, except for its large pink-gray brain, which was being devoured by centipedes, maggots, gigantic flies, and an army of fire ants. He chuckled because he knew this was what he would find, though the image of the brain made him feel like throwing up and shot tremors through his crotch and neck like little meteors. That night, when he brought the new girl he was dating to the patch of jungle he hadn’t finished clearing, he knew there would be no bones or insects and indeed they were gone but a terrible stench filled the air, and he couldn’t even return the girl’s kiss under that malignant odor. “What’s wrong?” she asked, brushing back her short weave of brown curls. Her skin, a cocoa-brown, shone like a jazzy dream in the blue moonlight. “You not smelling anything, right?” “No…you smelling something?” He chuckled. “Let’s just go out instead, eh. I go buy you the best drink you ever had.” She frowned. “You want to go out?” “Not I want to,” he said as he pulled her out, and it was only when they were far down the road that the odor got fainter, though he could still detect it. He chuckled but for the first time, he felt something sharp in his eye at the same time, and he swallowed and looked at her instead of looking away. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

33 Even Amidst the Carnage of a Flying Saucer’s Spontaneous Appearance It May Be Found

Teal light so so teal from that old bat-flecked streetlamp down the street shining into the window of the abandoned white stone-and-wood house well abandoned except for on the bed where Salvinia Miguel de Cervantes and the nameless man she has found since the world ended are lying down almost chest to chest, you may have experienced a jolt there at my informing you the world has ended and in fact the simple explanation is that there are many worlds not even including the thousands of universes outside our own but simply the worlds within ourselves and even outside for each of us is a complete world accessible perhaps to none but ourselves a statement that if true should be impossible to proclaim but some truths may simply seem impossible, zounds, and anyhow for Salvinia Miguel de Cervantes and the few other residents of the distant Caribbean island of São Carlos who are still alive those self-worlds have been wrenched apart like an only child from the harbor of her mother’s arms or like a beer bottle shattering in slowwwwwwwwwwwww motion and if you are wondering how Salvinia Miguel de Cervantes has ended up where she is, you must first understand that one Sunday but two days from when I began this piece of breathless concentration the distant Caribbean island of São Carlos was unceremoniously visited by a tourist no one had expected to see, a colossal coconut- yellow flying saucer shaped precisely like a Belle Époque dinner plate, its body glittering in the afternoon dullness by three rings of amber green and blue lights like those you see on airport runways, now believe me the sky was simply empty at first except for some gray clouds peppering a sky as blue as Mega Man’s armor and then all of a sudden a UFO appears hovering above the sea in the harbor in the capital city and hover it did for much of the afternoon and by this point a few people had begun to evacuate into the impregnable walls of churches and to relatives’ homes in the mountains and to the vast limestone caves normally reserved for fruit bats and tourists and onto the white yachts and dinghies painted every color of the rainbow heading out to sea to escape, a great quantity of these excursions spurred on by the stentorian ravings of a mad emigrant from Alabama who somehow acquired a yellow megaphone and began to shout out theories The Bermuda Triangle extends as far as the Azores I always knew extraterrestrial life forms were involved but no one listened the fools everyone evacuate by boat and do not trust your compass head for the nearest island or Europe if possible and all be prepared for the return of our Lizard King while another man this one a zealot from Fatima in Portugal his eyes wide

34 and red his gaunt face juddering claimed that the UFO was nothing less than Jesus Christ’s chariot for His Second Coming and its flashing lights were the eyes John of Patmos described in such profusion in Heaven through his extraordinary visions even though the rest of the day’s events had not gone according to John’s prophecies Do not flee my people but stay and pray for your salvation before this vision of incomprehensible glory and so some did for a while until it got too hot and sticky but most of the islanders decided in fact to go to town from wherever they were and watch the flying saucer up close and take endless cell phone pictures while the police rallied together the local defense force and tried to create a wall of soldiers in front the civilians in case something happened but it was too late since the silent hovering aircraft had already been the impetus to create Carnival many months in advance as women had brought their red grills to cook chicken and breadfruit while people were flooding into the hotel bars to buy overpriced beer and soon amidst the smoke from the grills the Carnival trucks themselves arrived with their skyscraper speakers and music began to blast and the soldiers started snapping their fingers and nodding their heads as they stood patrol for many of these people were emigrants from the other islands and knew how to put on a damn good fete, nonetheless, nothing happened until the sun began to sink, making the UFO’s metal gleam like liquid, and an icy drizzle sent the women with processed hair running for cover, but this was when the flying saucer sprang into action or more accurately two hatches opened one on the left and one on the right of the aircraft and out of each snaked a long gray metallic tube with a terrible claw at the end and then a chamber opened below the flying saucer in the center of the rings of flashing lights and out came two nets nothing very original as far as UFO designs go but quite effective for capturing and massacring people which was precisely what began to happen what the shit is that those things look like arms shit run run grab her run run no time just run oye move the fuck out my way the long arms with claws on the sides of the flying saucer zoomed into the crowd and began snatching human beings amidst all the screams and who was not snatched was sliced in two or three or seven and then from the rings of lights came a searing ray of orange that turned all it touched into smoldering black powder and within two hours the island was a disaster of flames and dried blood how absurd how utterly ridiculous and I would well agree except that this particular line of unmanned aircraft is a well-known interworldly menace created many decades ago in the universe of Xcea by a clan of ruthless robotic engineers and no one knows why it chose São Carlos in this universe if there was any choice involved at all or why this absurd device almost worthy of the Trojans’

35 horse has since disappeared, to the sorrow and fury of news reporters for news thrives on distanced violence to exist, all they have are images of a smoking island hardly anyone had heard of and you bet people are sending their help by making endless Facebook groups that proclaim their virtual pity for a day, anyway ahem no one knows if the flying saucer will return but who we must return to is Salvinia Miguel de Cervantes, who was one of the few to have escaped on one of the whale-watching ships this one heading to St. Kitts, surely this was a monster the white boat had never expected to see even if Ahab had been at its wheel the ship was flooded with people like slaves packed into a hold and Salvinia had barely even made it on because of the rush of people piling into the already-chockablock boats, she had been dragging her little girl Simonetta with her by the wrist so hard that the girl had started to cry to banshee-wail and these tears may well have helped her cut through the throng and get onto the boat, what surprising courtesy one sometimes sees, and now here she is in St. Kitts in a room with a man she just met the night before, the evening she arrived he must have taken pity on her fatigued cheeks amidst all the chaos of the people suddenly arriving in the harbor for she had truly been about to drop down flat on her face Excuse me ma’am do you need some assistance she would have ordered away a creature with so beggarly an exterior except that his eyes were poor in a different way and perhaps she was simply too exhausted but one thing led to another and soon people were even evacuating St. Kitts in their fear of the UFO turning on them next soon perhaps all the world would evacuate to elsewhere though all runners must eventually run into the insurmountable, but this man was too poor to flee, he in fact had only a tiny shack with shower curtains covering his windows and a powdery asbestos roof, but he took Salvinia and Simonetta there for the night gave them a sad and grateful dinner of day-old penny bread with cheddar and some Kool-Aid and then a cup of beer for Salvinia and himself he asked no questions but only said I just happy you and your little girl still alive her English was not so great because she had come from a Portuguese-and-some-Spanish-speaking home but she understood enough of what he said and nodded with a smile, he was the color of old coconut husk his hair a small garden of gray and white curls and his face was weathered by difficulty but she felt good anyway just by the way he smiled, never would she have imagined herself in a house alone with a man well since she’d had Simonetta anyway but how life changes she was almost forgetting the UFO already from the newness of her surroundings or perhaps she was just too shocked anyhow the first night he slept on the floor and she and her girl together and now tonight after she has slept in

36 and helped him wash his clothes in the pipe and had a dinner of corned beef he is inside her, while Simonetta sleeps on the rocking chair because she has never done so before look Mommy it’s so ancient can I try it out and before you know it she was fast asleep, It’s a magical chair from Nevis the man had told her, and Salvinia let the man into his own bed with her not sure why she was doing it she still hadn’t even asked him his name knew next to nothing about him and she had left her husband four months ago yet here she was she knew he wanted her before she even felt his erection in the bed and she let him inside her but no further we can’t wake up Simonetta and he chuckled It’s a miracle I even got it up so they stayed their bodies wrapped like strange gifts in the teal light from that bat-peppered streetlamp Old Faithful he called it because it has never gone out since I’ve been alive unlike all the others in this cheap street after a while he could no longer sustain it and she chuckled because he left her of his body’s unintentional accord, she swallowed, drew his arm over her, kissed his hand, and lay with her eyes closed against his chest because that was all she needed right now nothing more, she would see what happened in her world tomorrow but for now there was nothing else and if she was obliterated right this moment by some terror from the unknown, well, it wouldn’t be so very bad, she mused, not so bad at all, of course she really wanted to fall asleep because she knew the longer she stayed awake the closer she would be to realizing the magnitude of the outer-space empty densities around her, that she had not stopped running even as she lay silent in a bed, perhaps we are always running even in our emptiest dreams, and as she thought of these things and the man she had left and Simonetta she kept expecting Old Faithful’s electric flow to stop as the UFO reappeared with its silent inexplicable bloodlust but nothing happened even as her heart thudded thudded thudded, the teal light illumed the man’s eyes too because he could not sleep either, and then she smiled again briefly and closed her eyes and vowed not to sleep, in fact, so as to hold onto this strange and beautiful moment as long as she could, let herself drift through that teal sea until she became a mermaid, then Simonetta was suddenly at her bedside tapping her elbow Oh shit but the girl only asked with trembling eyes if she could scoot in because she had had a bad dream about the thing in the sky and she felt cold and damp, Salvinia stared at her for a moment, the man had already turned onto his back with downcast eyes and then Salvinia said Of course, come right in, the girl slid right in between them, her body flecked by the teal, Are you still scared, her mother said fingering her daughter’s braids, No, Simonetta said, well, yes, a little, Let me see if I have any cocoa sticks, the man said getting out of bed but Simonetta said No, stay, I

37 feel better like this, and Salvinia and the man looked at each other, and then they lay back down and smiled, the world outside rasping with an old wind and the cries of insect bats and filled with that strange and lovely light for as long as the night would last, perhaps there are hundreds of Salvinias waking up in hundreds of undisturbed São Carloses in hundreds of universes right now, by all the gods, what worldliness, and yet, even if just one Salvinia and one Simonetta and one nameless Kittian are laying in such a poor triangle on a hard bed bathed in teal as we have here, well, I’d say that that’s all that’s all, for now.

38 Aunt Maud

The first afternoon of our first summer in the world, my little brother and I were running back to our house up the grassy hill from the beach to get our scuba gear, as the tourists had left and only the cursing fishermen in their dinghies were still in the water. Our parents had left for a trip out of the island half an hour ago, and we were ready to dive down into dark caves filled with sapphire eels and explore the islet off the coast and do all the things our father had forbidden. I was already in my pink bikini; Pinto, my brother, needed his swim trunks. But when we got to the top of the hill and reached our white house, we found Aunt Maud Lynn waiting on the front step like a giant blocking the entrance to a palace. She seemed vastness itself, casting a shadow across the steps and down over us, and it took me a moment to realize she had our dive instructor, Verna, by her emerald locks. “Tell this urchin never to set foot here again, or I’ll call the police,” Aunt Maud murmured, eyes swinging like an interrupted voyeur’s. Her free hand was white and trembling, and a vein, blue-black as her daily pills, throbbed in her temple. As her body shuddered, she gave off the stink of our father’s Paco Rabanne. So many decades later, I realize too well that we didn’t think through our decisions after our parents’ departure, and I can follow the trail, like Nancy Drew, of what would soon lead to that summer’s horrors. But back then, when our aunt was staying with us that summer, I was only a thing of twelve with sand under my toenails and candy stuck in my teeth, and I was only slightly less volatile than Pinto, who was nine. Oh, my Pinto. I still can’t bring myself to talk about what you did…but let me return to us atop the hill, facing our house and the vastness of Aunt Maud Lynn. At the sight of our aunt’s enormity, holding Verna with the mad eyes of Jonah’s fish, Pinto and I—I with more restraint—began to protest, while Verna glared at the clouds with folded arms. But Aunt Maud simply humphed and let Verna go over the last step. She started telling us to come inside, but Pinto put on his most beggarly pout, and her face softened. “Just don’t let me see you hanging around with that female, especially you, Pinto,” she said. A shudder shook her neck and shoulders. “Now clean yourselves off, and come inside. It’ll be teatime soon.” She vanished behind the door, the scent of cologne lingering in the air.

39 “What did you do to her?” I whispered as Verna got to her feet, rubbing her dreadlocks. Pinto blushed as Verna brushed dust off her long sand-brown legs. “I came to sell your dad this shell I found,” she said, extracting it from her pocket, “but no one answered the door, so I tapped on the window. Then—” she spat. “Shit. I just saw her for a second and then she ran to the window and started screaming at me.” Pinto’s face scrunched up. “She was always crazy,” he said, shaking his head. I snorted. We had never really suspected Aunt Maud of much because up until our parents had flown off St. Teresa that afternoon, our minds had gone only to our constant studies, the ecstasies of our occasional dives to the trenches of the ocean with Verna, and our dreams of canoeing across the Gulf of Mexico to escape from the Caribbean altogether. Aunt Maud wrote textbooks for schools across the Caribbean, which she gave as bubble-wrapped gifts to my father that he never opened, and she seemed to own an infinite closet of sparkling pointed slippers and Pre-Raphaelite gowns she stretched across her chubby figure whenever Dad called her over, though we had seen her once in town and she looked so much like every other t-shirted person that I wouldn’t have recognized her if my mother hadn’t said, “Nina-Marie, go say hi to your aunt while I get some meat pies from Mania’s.” We probably wouldn’t have recognized her as an aunt at all had she not been addressed that way to us. She looked little like our svelte, pretty mother, though they were sisters. Aunt Maud seemed like one of those strange, dumpy, kindly- faced women from fairytales who might live deep within the forest. There was a young, very feminine man, Mr. Sherlock, maybe five or so years younger than Mom, who came to see Mom and brought her flowers sometime, and sometimes they would go out together because my mother said she needed a girls’ night. They had been friends for years, and sometimes Sherlock came along with other, equally effeminate men, fawning over my mother. I did not know what to make of that but I knew I liked Mr. Sherlock because he brought me candy and he just laughed when Pinto swayed his hips like him, though my mother slapped Pinto once for calling him a gay. My father was silent and curt around Mr. Sherlock and once made Mr. Sherlock cringe when he shook his hand too hard. But Mom always kissed Dad before she left, and it was sometimes a nasty kiss that made me want to turn away, and Dad would be full of high spirits afterward. Because I had my mother’s doelike eyes and short nose, and Pinto already had Dad’s sad brown face, I remember suspecting once that Aunt Maud wasn’t an aunt at all, but one of the

40 changelings I had seen in a movie. She had never had a husband, I uncovered after prying my mom for an hour once when she’d taken out the special wine for a family dinner. Her French accent was much more potent than Mom’s. We saw her every few months, when she would come, transformed into a perfumed princess, to our father’s histrionic book-reading parties, which our mother quietly attended when the larder was too full to validate a trip to the market; Mr. Sherlock had attended them once, too. Though Aunt Maud had a grand house in the capital city, none of us had ever been invited to it. We had only passed it once on our way somewhere; her home was faint blue, like the surface might have looked to something lying on the bottom of the sea. Ours was a cloudy white. It was finally summer, but that usually made no difference in our lives. Our parents home-schooled us through the year, cutting lessons short on Saturdays and cutting everything on Sunday, refusing even to send us to Sunday school, as our father believed it a violation of the Sabbath. Dad was a balding and bespectacled critic of Caribbean writers, exalting them through the nights with massive paragraphs and no references to other writers of the globe, save for D. H. Lawrence; Dad read us his articles, had they been published in “The Bibliographical-Critical Journal of the West Indian Postcolonialistical Literary Canon,” but also lectured on Shakespeare and Dickens to round out our studies of literature. “Too much else,” he’d say. Our father had been born in Saba, our mother in the Marquesas. They’d eventually settled in the tiny island of St. Teresa, which was wedged into the Caribbean Sea, far enough from the other islands to look like a lost thought of plate tectonics. “Post-Columbian,” our father said of it with an impish grin. “I wish Shakespeare was dead,” Pinto said to me in private once. When I told him he was, he frowned, then said, “No, really dead. No traces left.” I told him off, but I secretly agreed. On our lunch and teatime breaks, we would sneak off to the beach. The jetty’s stilts were encrusted with barnacles and pulsing octopi fought on the jade surface, so it was all my brother and I could do not to leap into the water, tanks on backs and dive masks on our faces. Verna was the only P.A.D.I-certified dive instructor on the island, so when he could no longer endure our begging, our father paid her $550 EC to teach us how to dive. Those had been the best days of our lives, going with Verna beyond the sixty feet our certification allowed us and feeding the blue morays in the trenches before the water turned black and heavy from the depth. The first few days, Verna had worn scuba gear like us, showing us how to remove our masks underwater and pass our second stages and signal for sharks. But once we got the hang of it, she swam with

41 just her dive mask, for she had sperm-whale lungs she was said to have inherited from her grandfather, leader of the first Jamaican bobsled team, and could hold her breath for over an hour. More than once, she had taken us far below the point at which the ocean lost all its colors but a hazy blue, and we’d seen then that her yellow eyes could glow like a denizen of the deep. At those depths, where shipwrecks dream, we’d gotten so high on nitrogen that I’d offered my regulators to stingrays, and Pinto nearly drowned one time because he tried to take off all his gear to tell Verna he’d fallen in love with her otherworldly beauty. Verna, who never got narced, just laughed when she told us what we’d done. I often brought along my music box in my knapsack on a dive, and while we were back on shore and Verna was laughing at our near-deaths underwater, but there was only time I opened the music box in front Verna. The box was a birthday present from Mom, carved from fragrant oak, and I took it almost everywhere, so it could safely be on my person, playing a sparkly version of Fauré’s Pavane pour un infant défunte. Mom had told me it was her favorite song, the one that drew dilettantish lads to her lap. When I had nightmares, I played it, sometimes even when I ran from my room to sleep in her arms, the music tinkling down the hall. My father snored like a horse and sometimes farted in his sleep but I didn’t care; I would pretend to have nightmares sometimes just so cuddle with her when I felt lonely, since Pinto refused to let me near him. As I had boyish hair and hated skirts, Pinto leered when I opened the box and say it was the only thing that proved I was a girl, at which point I’d kick at the place that proved he wasn’t one and reiterate the box’s amative properties. The one time I opened it in front Verna—I had brought it along before, but hesitated to take it out—the girl with the green hair sneered, though I caught her softly frowning at the box soon after. “Where did you get it?” she asked. “My mother,” I said. “For my birthday.” I’d considered lying for a moment, but I figured this would give the box enough of a sense of authority to protect it from her claws. “Ah,” she replied. I was shocked to see how her face fell for a moment, the devilish light put out, and it was then for the first time I thought of Verna less as a force of nature than as a person like me or Pinto. A cloud flitted overhead, dulling the sparkle of the waves off the shore and lessening the intense green of Verna’s tresses, and I suddenly felt an urge to ask Verna more about her life, but I was interrupted by Pinto leaping back into the water after his air tank, which

42 had rolled down the sand into the sea, and Verna left my side to go help. When she came back, I had put the box away, and I never took it back out in her presence—except for one time later. Verna also invented. Though she was working on a machine that could rocket down to the Marianas Trench, she lived most of her life underwater, exploring the depths with knives and barometer in hand, for she believed the only way to create workable machines was to first exist in their environments. She’d told us that her hair used to be black as ink, but after months of being underwater had turned emerald, which had spurred Pinto more than once to stay underwater so long that he’d needed to use air from my tank. When neither was in the sea, Pinto saw Verna in the sky, as she had also told us she’d once built a rocket that could go to the moon and beyond, which was fitting, as I’d never seen her with humans beyond ourselves. When I asked why she never tried to sell her machines so as to go to the glittering cities in America or Europe, she’d spat and said, “Cities are for people without love.” She lived with her mother, a ghostly being with yellow eyes, on an otherwise uninhabited islet a few minutes from St. Teresa. Neither had discernible ages; my father had once joked that Verna was in the sea so much she’d become preserved like glass. Verna swam to the big island in calm weather, but in storms she would rev up her speedboat and skip over the waves like a flying fish. Like Jack London’s pipe- dream yacht, it was named Snark. She had once taken us in the boat to her home because she’d forgotten her dive knife, and when we entered that palace on the rocks that was every color of Pena in Sintra and was adorned with seashells and stones from far-off worlds, we saw she had a ferocious six-foot Humboldt squid in a sunken pool that she wrestled with to build up her resistance to deep-water pressures. She said her laboratory was beneath the pool. Since we had gone diving every day for two weeks before being certified, I sort of thought we would just continue diving forever. But our father forbade us from diving unattended after we got out Open Water certification, and we were only allowed to dive with Verna when we accumulated 300 points worth of correct answers in our classes, each question worth 5. When our father realized our swift accumulation of 1200 points was the result of bribed memorization, he raised the bar to 3,000 points, at which point we nearly gave up. But on the rare nights our parents went out to dinner parties and left us with the maid, Amanda Seneca, we tasted freedom. “Children need to learn how to live by themselves,” she would say, her round brown face lit by a winking smile. “Go by the sea and catch something, so I can show you how to cook it.”

43 And when our father was napping in his hammock and our mother was in town, Marcus, our skinny Carib gardener from Dominica, would show us how to make snake oil from boa constrictors and would point out where the biggest ramps and natural loop-de-loops for bikes were in the island’s three mountains. He had few teeth in his mouth and shags of his white in his braids, and his ghost stories were so vivid that even Pinto the disbeliever would have to read himself to sleep after hearing one. Marcus had promised to one day take us to his home on Morne Cherie, where he bred fighting cocks and grew cannabis. So when we discovered our mother and father were going on an Iberian cruise, followed by an esoteric writers’ workshop in Lourdes—more specifically, when we discovered to our moray-eyed-and-jawed astonishment we weren’t going with them for those nineteen days—we leapt for joy as we’d read the Caribs did after raiding an Arawak village. Aunt Maud had volunteered to babysit my brother and me, and we knew it was going to be a school-free summer, for once. My parents had argued one night about having Aunt Maud stay with us, with my dad saying this was her chance to do something and then my family is my family; I had just assumed then that meant Aunt Maud would be a fun aunt who would let us run wild. We had been waiting to have pillow fights worthy of the Coliseum with Amanda Seneca and Pinto told me endless times he was finally going to sleep on the roof so he could look out for shooting stars, one of which had to be Verna. I called him a stupid Jiminy Cricket, but I was grinning like him. Now was my chance to catch more fish to cook, even, peradventure, the big reef shark Verna said visited the jetty when the water was blood-red and had more than once, according to another of Verna’s stories, killed and eaten a female whale. I imagined life could only get better when the jet took our parents away. Aunt Maud had puttered into the driveway in her forget-me-not Volkswagen Beetle an hour before she was due. My father had answered the door, still in his briefs, and Aunt Maud had blushed through her rouge, then proffered her cheek. She’d then sat down at the kitchen table, asking Pinto for a glass of water, which she used to gulp down a long fat blue-black capsule from an orange container labeled “SSRI.” She fanned herself and redid her rouge and told us to go watch TV. When our parents were finally ready, Aunt Maud hugged her sister for a half-second and then again puffed out her cheek for our father to kiss, shifting so that his lips brushed hers. When they’d driven off, Aunt Maud briefly seemed lost with us staring at her, and then she’d instructed us to bring her luggage up to our parents’ bedroom, though our mother had forced us

44 to make up the guest bedroom. But after we followed her order, Aunt Maud locked herself up in there and told us to go play outside. We ran to the beach. I waved at a plane droning overhead and scolded Pinto for giving the middle finger to the aircraft’s underbelly. “You’ll be sad if they never come back,” I said, but Pinto just flipped me off as well, at which point I chased his skinny laughing body down to the beach. It wasn’t to last. Aunt Maud resumed our father’s lessons on literature, asking us to analyze the undertones of his articles. Our lunch and teatime breaks were spent with her at the table, which we thought might not be so bad because the first night our aunt was here, Amanda Seneca had still been her old winking-behind-the-back self. The only oddities were Aunt Maud gulping down her fat blue-black pill before meals, which we soon learnt she did before every meal; and the dearth of conversation, as our father usually tested us over dinner or our mother yelled at Pinto for rummaging through her things. But when we saw Amanda Seneca the next afternoon, she had become as silent and solemn as an Easter Island head. It was only days later she whispered to me as I passed her in the hallway, “Your aunt is mad.” Even Marcus slowly lost his grin, trimming the crotons in silence and sweeping the garage with a zombie’s vacuous stare. We could no longer joke with them, as Aunt Maud said it was “over-familiarity with servants.” And after an hour of TV after dinner, we had to be in bed by 7:45 and asleep by 8:30. The second night, our parents called, and after Aunt Maud got off the phone with them, she told us that unless we did exactly what she said, she’d have to give our parents a bad report, which would mean being caned when they returned home. My father was a different person with a belt in his hand, as my palm and rear well knew, so her words hit home. Two days after our parents left was Sunday, and we found ourselves trumpeted out of bed to get into the church clothes we hadn’t worn for so long that moths and spiders puffed out of them when we touched their hangars. Aunt Maud, eyes red and lined with theatrical blackness, sang tremolo as the church’s keyboard player beat out Carnival rhythms. When it was time to receive the transubstantiated bread, she made me and Pinto bow four times to the statue of Mary before walking to our seats. Back at home, Aunt Maud made me sweep downstairs, while Pinto only had to make his bed. When I was done, she ran her hand over every surface in the house, licking it and pinching up her face. When she could find no dust, she gave me a newspaper article to analyze, “The Last Voyage of the Halácsillag,” which showed an enormous ship

45 crashed upon a beach. Aunt Maud looked from me to the photo four times, then went and locked herself in our parents’ room again, having given me ten minutes to explain what the story meant to me and why I needed to do a better job in life. She didn’t come out of the room nearly half an hour later, however, smelling faintly of Paco Rabanne once more, and she had such a funeral mourner’s face that I felt scared bringing up the article. Pinto had taken a nap. We didn’t see Verna for a while; our aunt was strict about the 3,000-point rule. Somehow, I didn’t mind. The way everyone looked at that green-haired undine with extremes of emotion was wearing on me. I’d begun to even sort of like Aunt Maud picking on me. But Pinto was in throes. He would beat his breast with the tube of Crest while we brushed our teeth, and glare and stare and tug his hair. Since he was nine, I just teased him and played my music box when he tried to sleep, until he started swearing with the patois he’d picked up from fishermen. On his birthday four months ago, I’d beaten him up because he tried to fling the music box out the window, which in turn earned both of us ten whacks from our father’s ruler. Pinto, who always hated books, had been given a new copy of Sprat Morrison as his gift. In fact, the only gifts he’d ever liked were scraps of metal from Marcus, which Pinto had many times tried to invent “thinking machines” out of without success. The fifth night of Aunt Maud’s regime, Pinto suddenly shook me out of a dream about wrestling a green mermaid. “What the hell?” I muttered, looking at the clock: 3:29 a.m. “Something’s in the house,” he said under his breath. I scolded him again and went back to sleep, as he’d been waking up from nightmares since his last birthday. But I couldn’t get back to sleep, and after half an hour, I heard someone walk past our room, muttering. “It’s just Aunt Maud,” I said after a moment. “Why is she up so late?” “Maybe she wanted a drink? I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.” But Pinto just stood there trembling until I got up and shoved him into his bed. “Screw off,” he said, and I flicked him off. “You’ll see,” he continued. “I’m not going to sleep until the sun comes up. And if you fall asleep before me, I’ll throw your music box outside.” When we both woke up, as Pinto had started snoring long before me, we found Aunt Maud grinning over an enormous cup of coffee, her eyes red. She reeked of cologne again, and the smell of wine misted the kitchen. She was turning the container of fat pills over in her hand.

46 “I’m going to find out what she does,” Pinto said to me in our room as he got ready to shower. He shuddered and nearly dropped his towel. “She’s probably a murderer.” “Why the heck would you think she’s a murderer?” I asked. “I don’t know! Maybe that’s why she uses so much cologne—to cover up the scent of blood!” As I started to argue, he continued, “And don’t you remember Verna couldn’t tell us what she saw in the—” “Okay, okay,” I muttered. “We’ll spy on her tonight.” At 7:45 p.m., we pretended to fall asleep. When the clock read 9, Pinto got out of bed and listened by our door. After a minute, he opened it and started down the stairs. I swore and went after him. To my horror, the front door was open, and when I tiptoed down the stairs, I found my brother carrying the ladder out of the garage. “Are you completely—” I started, hands flailing. “Her window is closed!” he hissed. “She won’t hear it. It’s the only way to get close enough.” I tried to grab the ladder from him, but when it clattered against the side of the house, we froze for a minute. The house showed no signs of acknowledgement. I decided it would be safest to just let Pinto set up the ladder. He scurried up it like an opossum and peeked through the glass. After forty seconds, I suddenly remembered the front door was open. As I ran to shut it, I heard someone coming down the stairs. I ducked under the downstairs window. When no one came outside after twenty seconds, I peered through the window. My eyes widened. Aunt Maud was in a pair of slacks several sizes too big for her, which I identified moments later as my father’s, as well as his loafers, an androgynous dress shirt, my father’s most despised tie, and his track jacket. Her face, briefly lit by a lamp, I saw was painted precisely like a geisha’s, and her hair was up in two high pigtails. She sat at the table, spreading papers and cards before her. The Lark Ascending began slinking from my father’s speakers. After a minute, she glanced at the window and I ducked, but not before I’d seen that she was crying. Pinto and I stayed out for about an hour, he having scurried down to look in the window too, and we only went back in when a pale blue light in our parents’ room bloomed on. This happened nearly every night. Three mornings later, I found her slumped over the sofa, her plumpness stretched into my mother’s expensive camellia-printed cheongsam, her lips smeared with icing and her toes a deathly white from having squeezed into my mother’s ballet flats. She reeked of hundreds of potent perfumes. Blue Velvet was playing silently on the TV,

47 and the wine bottle was on the floor. She let out a purring moan as I prodded her. I’d jumped back and tiptoed back up to my room. When I went back down twenty minutes later, she had vanished, leaving the chaos of a shipwreck in her wake. Once in the afternoon, we came back in after she’d sent us out to exercise for an hour in the yard and heard the insidious glee of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” booming from her room while the bedsprings creaked. On another of our nocturnal ladder missions, I had nearly been caught, for she had been gazing out our parents’ window at a tall hotel at the far end of the beach, where the yellow windows were silhouetted with conjoined couples, her eyes wide and shimmering as a Sailor Moon girl’s. The crux came when I woke up at 3:32 one morning, my bladder burning, and went unthinking to my parents’ bathroom as I was accustomed. Their room door had been open. As I walked through, I glimpsed Aunt Maud lying on the bed in nothing but a mermaid bra and my father’s boxers, her hair loose and long, her face, lit by the silent glow of the TV, gazing at the ceiling. She held a vast bread knife above her chest. Her expression—eyelids half-shut, lips a sad contented smile—stayed in my mind long after she saw me and started screaming in English, strange tongues, and even Macbeth, until the image seemed to have trickled down into my organs and was bubbling and frothing like a deep-sea vent. I’d run from the room but couldn’t sleep, and she was waiting for me and Pinto in the kitchen the next morning. “What did you see?” she asked me as Pinto and I walked in. “Er—” “You were in our parents’ clothes,” Pinto chimed in, at which I kicked his calf hard. “What’s going on?” I said after a moment of Aunt Maud leering at me. “Let’s try a different question,” she said. “Why do you, Nina, think your parents left?” I thought for a moment. “Because Dad always says he wants to visit Europe, and they got a good deal on the cruise, and, um, the conference on writing.” “So why didn’t your daddy go alone, since everything seems to be about him?” “He’d be lonely,” Pinto tried. “He already is,” Aunt Maud said, though she looked hurt. “And do you know why? Because he hates your mother.” She swallowed. “He hates her ‘secret’ affair with Watson.” “What?” Pinto said. “Shut up,” I said, fists tightening. “It’s true. I have proof.”

48 “So why would he go on a cruise with her if he hates her, then?” I said after a moment, folding my arms, though I remember feeling unnerved at that little firework of a word: proof. “Your father is going to abandon your mother over there!” she said, voice rising as she stood over us. “You think he doesn’t know of, of Watson? A pretty woman like that not followed by other men? Ha! Beauty curses all around it. You think he really wants…her in his life?” Pinto ran from the room, eyes watering. I raised my arms into the air. “You see what you did?” I cried. But Aunt Maud simply humphed and turned on her heel. Her entire body seemed red. “Maybe when you’re more mature, you’ll understand, little girl.” “Watson?” I said. Aunt Maud smiled, and it was then she looked madder than a picture of King Lear Dad had shown me once. Her face trembled for a moment, she opened her mouth, and then she snorted and galumphed up the stairs. I stood there for a moment. After drinking Coke from the bottle and splashing my face in the kitchen sink, I went up to my room. I looked around, then suddenly shuddered and went for my music box. It was fine, though a fat black and blue fly had been perched atop it. I swallowed, holding it against my chest for a moment. I opened it. Same lovely sounds. I smiled. For a moment, I remember thinking, everything will be just fine. Then I put it back and went to Pinto’s room. He was glowering at the wall. “She’s a liar,” he said. “I’m gonna kill her. I’m going to take her pills and—” “Hold on,” I said. “You’ll go to jail, and they’ll make you eat bread from the incinerator.” “I don’t care!” he said, but he told me soon after that we should destroy her some other way. He found one that afternoon. When our dad called at 3 p.m., Aunt Maud said we were both sick with a pernicious flu and that we had been spying on her while she was trying to relax. She had by then added to the extensive note of our, Amanda Seneca’s, and Marcus’s daily wrongdoings she’d stuck to the fridge with a warning that our parents wanted to see it, so its removal would be suicidal. Pinto declared we cut the phone line. Serendipitously, a tropical storm flared up that afternoon, and Aunt Maud had heaved herself upstairs to shut all the windows. Downstairs, under the cover of closing the doors and windows, we unplugged the phone line and Pinto was on the verge of cutting the wire, but I realized she would see through it and that we’d be even more cut off from our parents. So I wrestled him away from the wire,

49 nearly losing an eye in the process. When our aunt came down some minutes after, gasping for breath like a beached cetacean, I thought of the scissors with a tinge of shame. But after finding her passed out drunk on the sofa again the next morning, having eaten the entire guava tart Amanda Seneca had made specially for us, my desire to see her suffer recongealed. Pinto still said he wanted to kill her; I was too unnerved to notice how deep he placed things inside himself then. Once the storm had passed, we went to Verna on the pretense of finding out if the main road was clear. We’d seen her boat through our window, and Verna was on the beach when we went out. I asked if she could invent anything to make the pills Aunt Maud took every day painful, but not lethal, a word Pinto didn’t understand. Verna grinned when I described the medicine, then said she would make a capsule filled with new pills that looked exactly the same as the blue-black monstrosities. “But,” Verna had said, glancing at the clouds, “they’ll take time to produce, so I want something in return.” She looked at me, eyes glinting. “Your music box.” I froze. My mother’s face flashed before me and a shudder shot down my spine. I saw her like a filthy beggar on a distant sidewalk in some Dickensian city, eyes red with tears, body shuddering in the cold. Pinto knocked me out of my vision. He rubbed my elbow and told me to stop being such a girl and if Verna says it, it must be right. I had a sudden urge to knock him down and strangle Verna. “Give me a moment,” I said. I moved away and glared at the sand, the sea, at the islet where the emerald-haired bitch lived. The lighthouse-like palace caught my eye. It was dark from clouds, the gems and shells of the palace’s walls not shimmering as they did in the light. As I squinted, I thought I saw a figure at a window in the top of the tower—a grayish form that seemed, even from this distance, to have eyes that faintly glowed. I shook my head and blinked. Her mother? A ghost? When I looked again, no one was at the window, but the image remained in my mind. The islet seemed as it had that day I first opened the music box and saw the place in shadow: dark, lonely, strange. I swallowed. After a long moment I went back, meaning to shake Verna’s hand, but I found myself hugging her. I felt her body tense up. For a moment, she seemed to come close to me, her scent of salt and coffee and what seemed like cigarettes filling my nostrils, and I had a brief vision of kissing her on the lips. Then she pushed me away and cleared her throat and snorted. “Well,” she said. “Is that a yes or a no?” Pinto laughed and I blushed. “Yes,” I replied softly.

50 She looked surprised for a moment, and then her grin returned. “Thanks. Excellent.” Verna said the pills would be ready in two days and that, as an added bonus, if we were scared of being caught, we could drop the other pills the one place Aunt Maud would never find them—the bottom of the ocean. Verna had just finished work on a bathysphere that could descend to the ocean floor and back like a torpedo, and, if we so desired, we could venture down and place the pills on the ocean bottom ourselves. I frowned and was going to say maybe, but then I remembered I had given her the box, and I sighed and put on a smile and said sure. Pinto was grinning like a madman. Verna sneaked up to our house the morning of the second day, and I let her in while Aunt Maud was taking a shower. We switched the pills with Verna’s, but I told Verna to wait until that afternoon for the rest of the deal, at which she reddened, then grinningly replied “the sea will be red tonight” before sneaking back out. It was Marcus who gave us the excuse to leave home that afternoon. He had brought seven cages of fighting cocks from his home in the back of his pickup and released them in our yard, causing bloody chaos. Amanda Seneca, who had winked as we made for the door, fell to her knees and began speaking in tongues to Aunt Maud, crying in scattered English that the cocks were a symbol of Ziz and their number an inversion of sanctity. In the madness, we slipped out, my music box in a plastic bag. The first thing we saw at the beach was Verna’s speedboat, anchored ten feet offshore. Verna herself was perched on the rocks like a strange mermaid, legs crossed, wind blowing her verdant dreadlocks. She grinned as she saw us. “You bring it?” she said. I peered at the bag. “Yeah.” Pinto trembled behind me. I hesitated to give Verna the bag, and she snatched it from me. In a second, blood was in my muscles, but Verna was simply peering into the bag. “Great,” she said, grinning that shark grin again. Her yellow eyes flickered. She sprang off the rock and walked past us, ruffling Pinto’s hair. He stiffened, and his face drained white. We waded over to the Snark. Verna roared over the purpling waves in a wide arc, passing her islet and going so far out that I began to think sea serpents would rise up under our boat. We reached a big raft, anchored to something far down. Beside it floated what looked like a white missile. “This is it,” she said. She sneered at our faces, then her face softened for a moment. We

51 looked, I’m sure, as though we’d just seen horlas. “I can’t guarantee my next operation of this will be free,” Verna said, “and since your daddy was already so excited about dive lessons….” “We’ll do it,” Pinto said. “Sure you don’t just want to drop the pills in now? They’ll reach the same place.” “No,” Pinto and I said after a moment. Verna grinned like a Glasgow mask. “Great,” she said. “Hop on top the raft, and I’ll show you how to get into the sub.” So we slipped inside the submarine, which was shaped like a space shuttle, and when we got in Verna ordered us to get into protective baggy suits she’d designed to withstand any pressure known to the Earth. And then we began our descent, torpedoing down past startled hammerhead sharks and past crags where enormous eels were slithering out with alien smiles and past a blue-black whale’s carcass. Verna had told us that at the bottom, we would see the gargantuan tubeworms thought to only live in the Pacific, and if we were lucky, we would see the primeval battles between sperm whales and giant and colossal squids, and if luckier still, that vile devourer of Bahamian vessels, the lusca. As the water turned black and we switched the searchlights on, we saw we were nearing the bottom, where hundreds of white red-tipped tubeworms, forgotten by light and time, fluttered, and, as we descended further, we saw a hag’s fresh corpse float past us, her hair streaming behind her like the tresses of gorgons. She disappeared seconds after we saw her, but I remember her dress was so tight that her left breast had burst through. And then the bathyscape touched down. Pinto and I looked out the window. I checked my suit’s buckles and then had to check and redo Pinto’s because he had turned into a wide-eyed manikin. We were about to press open the door when I remembered the pills. Verna had put them in a special container that was as tough as any submersible. Pinto pressed open the door as I turned back around and gave a squeak as I slapped his helmet. The door hissed open into a cabin filling with water. We stayed there until we were up to our necks in the water, which was so loud and strong that I felt as I’d been thrown inside the dinosaurs’ meteor. It was so strong indeed that Pinto clutched his crotch as we touched down on the sea floor, his eyes flung open even wider than before, and he would have been blown by a sudden sea wind into oblivion had I not grabbed him, though it was all I could do to not be blown away myself. After it died down, I placed the pills on the ocean floor. It was as I did I noticed there were other things there already.

52 I trained my helmet light on them. The first was a clock that had stopped one minute before midnight, or noon. Beside it was a little book, so perfectly preserved it seemed it had been there since the dawn of oceans. I leafed through it, glancing at Pinto as he prodded the tubeworms swaying over a volcanic vent like phalluses of the undead. I gasped in my helmet. The book seemed to be my mother’s, and the first entry was a letter to Mark Watson, an Englishman, whose name she said reminded her of her home. I struggled to make out the fast scrawl of her cursive. Stuck…never changing…because of the kids…duty. I skimmed and skimmed, until I was suddenly at the end, only one…send back soon by courier…your mad lover, Liselle. I stared and stared, until I reopened the book, eyes stinging, and saw dates: nine years ago, three years ago, and then less than a year ago. Something seemed wrong; the handwriting looked more like the note of our wrongdoings on the fridge than my mother’s—Aunt Maud’s. Another wind came up, and I dropped the book. Something flapped into my face—a page. I read it straight there on my helmet—a letter to Watson again, from five years ago, and yet though the handwriting was different, it was signed not M. W., but M.L.—and as I looked more closely, possessed by a strange thought I couldn’t quite define, I realized the writing really did resemble Aunt Maud’s, too. Was it all hers? All an elaborate absurd unreality? I skimmed the letter again, then began skimming the ocean floor for more, until I’d found the icy remains of a Spanish galleon; read three more diaries, two from my mother in the odd handwriting and one from Sir Henry Morgan; fought off a gulper eel for a text that also seemed to be from Watson, called “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” though I had no idea what its context was then; and a single three-year- old letter from Watson, this time clearly in my aunt’s hand, talking about eloping. I didn’t really understand the letter, however, for at the bottom, it was filled with swear words and childish figurines and a reference to Schopenhauer’s essay on suicide, and then, finally, like a movie made by an agoraphobe, it ended with, I hope you live happily ever after; I could wish no less to a complete maniac. For some reason, it made me happy, too, and I decided after a moment to leave everything on the ocean floor. I suddenly noticed my air was nearly out, so I signaled Pinto to stop bothering the worms. As we trudged back to the bathysphere, I saw a flatfish prodding the container of pills. I started stepping around it, my head ringing with what I thought the letters meant about my aunt’s manias, and then I aimed a kick at the fish. It flared red and flew away. Pinto tapped my shoulder as I reached for the pills, but I pushed his hand off. He grabbed me. When I turned, my heart

53 froze, for an eye as big as Pinto was leering at us from behind the bathysphere. A heart-red tentacle recoiled as I shone the light on its eye, and then the creature took off in a massive thrust, revealing a body hundreds of times larger than my parents’ jet. We began using all our air by screaming, and I grabbed him and struggled into the bathysphere. In the confusion, I forgot the pills. By the time we had risen out of the blackness, my heart had slowed and I remembered, cursing. Pinto was meanwhile grinning like a buffoon and middle-fingering the leviathan, though it had long vanished. At the surface, Verna, who, quickly shutting the music box and removing the hand that had been fingering her hair, asked us with what we’d seen. Pinto told her about the tubeworms and the beast, and I asked her to take us back home as fast as she could because I was tired; in reality, I wanted to get home and throw away the fake pills. We began speeding back through the reddening water in the Snark. It was as we neared the shore that we saw Aunt Maud wading through the water in her clothes, her arms covered with scratches, grinning from ear-to-ear, eyes wide as the lusca’s. She began moving out far, ignoring the boat completely, and soon she disappeared under the surface. We started yelling her name when she vanished, but there was no response. We began juddering like hearts under a floorboard. Pinto turned to Verna, who was peering at the sky. I screamed Aunt Maud’s name again. After a minute, we gasped as she breached the surface, about twelve feet from the boat, limbs flailing. She sank, then pushed herself up again. “What’s she doing?” I cried. Verna grinned, and her teeth seemed sharper than ever. Her eyes shone in the darkling world. “She took my pills. She now has a mad, almost psychic lust for the original pills, which she’ll do anything to get.” Pinto took a step back from Verna, glancing from her to the flailing Aunt Maud. “But,” she continued, “for some reason, she’s fighting it. The will to survive….” “Well, go save her!” I yelled, flailing my arms myself. “She can’t swim!” Verna’s eyes slid toward me. “I thought you asked me to make the pills.” “I didn’t mean for her to die!” “Well, my pills don’t kill anyone themselves. Besides, this was all your idea.” “Well, I changed my mind!” Pinto was trembling. He glared at Verna, stared at me, at the water. “Why me?” Verna asked after a moment, rubbing her dreadlocks.

54 “We’re not strong enough to bring her to the raft! Look, please! I’ll give you anything you want!” Verna peered at Aunt Maud. She snorted. “Not for that dumb bitch.” Unbeknownst to me, Pinto had been edging back. He suddenly gave a cry and ran toward the water where our aunt was. I grabbed his shirt, but he would’ve pulled me in had Verna not grabbed me. “No,” she said. “It’s too late, anyway. The shark is here.” And indeed, a fin taller than Aunt Maud had appeared. She had sunk under again as it showed up, and the last thing I saw was a glimpse of a giant tail flitting downward. Because of the sunset, we couldn’t tell if the water’s redness was blood or sun. I screamed. We leapt out of the boat and waded to shore and ran to the house because we didn’t know where else to run. I glanced back twice. Verna was still on the boat, staring at the water, feeling her cheek, the music box playing again. As we reached the front door, I heard the phone shrieking. I was too numb to answer it, and Pinto was in tears. Eventually, its asylum shriek passed away, and I went to the kitchen to check the number on the voicemail—our parents. “Whadu wedo,” Pinto murmured, wiping his face with his shirt. I just stared at the phone. My heart was thudding in my skull. “Well…since no one’s here to watch us….” “Amanda Seneca and Marcus will be here tomorrow morning.” I swore, thinking of their faces once they found out—and then, I realized, they’d be freed from the curse of her tyranny. I also only then noticed they’d left and that the kitchen was in shambles. “Oh, yeah. Well, since no one’s here until tomorrow morning….” I could hear his cheekbones rising. I turned, looked out at the twilight, and felt myself redden and smile. “Yeah….” I don’t know why I didn’t notice how strange his smile was then…. And so, we moved outside and found our dive gear, including the light this time. On the way down, I think my foot cracked through the wood of the last step. I remember my naïveté at thinking I might find her, ambivalently joyous but joyous, holding a ragged ghost’s hand somewhere in that vast undinal belly. We followed the torches down to the graying beach, to let the first summer of the rest of our lives begin again, filled with the placid suck of the sea. As we stood there, Pinto jumped and told me he’d seen a spirit run across the beach. I was too jittered to want to dive anymore, but….Somewhere amidst all this, I remember telling Pinto to throw out

55 the rest of Verna’s pills for some reason, and I didn’t realize, until I’d nearly forgotten them, that he’d kept them with him, right until his last day on the Nark. The next day, our parents puttered down in their plane, full of anecdotes and the wearing the weary smiles of returning voyagers. I was so afraid that I didn’t realize the significance of both of them arriving until much later. I told tell them, Pinto downcast and silent, about her going mad one night after taking her pills and running into the sea, which seemed a historical truth, but I added, couldn’t help myself, Mark Watson’s name; and I remember feeling the same coolness when my mother frowned and asked me who that was, and then told me she had expected Aunt Maud’s madness, for the pills were a madness to begin with, and what could we have done, and her eyes were the quick dull confusion of the honestly flummoxed, I can see them now, yes, the dull darkness of a sky that has never known fireworks. Pinto began chuckling, then cackling. I murmured Watson, Watson, until Mom told me with her dull eyes to please stop playing games so she could call the police! I looked at my father, but he was just as honestly astonished; and it was then I realized the will-o-the-wisps that had driven us all to the bottom of the sea. When Amanda Seneca came the next day and whispered things to Mom, she looked as maniacal as Maud had on Verna’s pills, but after a few weeks, it was all back to routine, except Marcus was fired, as he had come to work stinking of marijuana the day my parents returned, apparently having forgotten the date. My dad I stopped berating in my mind; he and Mom kept us closer in our cloud home than ever. I don’t remember when I started writing a diary, but I never wrote this story in complete, until now, after piecing together everything. Now that Pinto has taken the pills, and, in what must have been his last drunken horror, leapt himself off the deck of The Nark into Davy Jones’ infinite locker. He was twenty-two on a voyage in the South Seas, trying to find himself. He had become a kind of globe-trotting vagrant, living day to day with no clear goal. We hadn’t spoken in years; I found out he died in an interview with the ship’s captain on the news that had been put on YouTube, which I came across, astonishingly, by chance. So Lady Death reveals things, sometimes. My daughter, Segunda, seventeen, dives with me in the cold water when she isn’t leaping, grin-and-vodka-drunk, to the endless nameless music thumping with the strobe lights that fight the silence she so hates. I hadn’t dived in thirty-three years, until her beg-chiding became unforgettable, unlike memories, and haunted our house. Now, I mainly sit on my stone

56 steps when she’s in, listening to the sea’s soothing suck, its cadaverous hiss, my own skull moth- flapping with strobes. She knows nothing about my maudlin past. I like living through her eyes. By now, it’ll have been stuffed it into a stone-filled bottle and tossed—well, for you—into the tide far off somewhere. Let the sea devour the mysteries of the mad and the unlucky. I would rather leave them mysteries. I do not know what else I’ll find.

57 Annihilate

Verna of the Sea, Mermaid, Green-Hair Girl, Mad Scientist, Undine, Demon of the Depths, Come-Home-Before-Dark-My-Child-or-the-Girl-With-the-Green-Hair-Who-Lives-in- That-Old-Castle-Will-Get-You, Ariel, That Damn Wild Bitch: by all these names and more was the girl named Verna known, and they might have just come to mind, perhaps, had you caught a glimpse of her one bright midnight from the long pink and gray stone seawall along the edge of one side of the island of St. Teresa; had you been sitting on the crumbling wall to take a smoke, the waves whispering like ghosts and the air the faint chill of a Caribbean December and the night above the island carpeted with white and blue and green stars and the slow rainbow deaths of supernovas and distant earths filled with crystal forests, you would have had a clear view out to a rocky islet not far off the shore, on which was perched a building that looked more like a lighthouse now than the grand castle it must have once been, its walls studded with periwinkles, seashells, and otherworldly gems, the starglow sending the castle’s walls aglitter; and, had you squinted more or pulled out a pair of binoculars, you would have caught sight of a face peering out the top window of the castle at the town just to the side of the seawall, or perhaps the night sky above it. By the bright emerald of her shoulder-length locks, you would have recognized the fey beauty was Verna, and how bewitching indeed she might have appeared to someone who only had eyesight perceptive enough to make out a person in the castle’s window, staring like that at midnight, who knew what schemes she was thinking up. But if you looked closer, you might have been able to see something in her eyes, not least because they seemed to glow a faint yellow, but because she had the downcast eyes of a person who is too well-deep with sadness to cry. Startling expression. Blink. A person like that, the same girl who is said by superstitious locals to be a demon, whose hair is green from spending so much time deep in the sea where she could stay for hours with neither tank nor mask, who is said to have invented in her vast secret laboratory the starship that flew over town recently and exploded, injuring crowds of onlookers, but who the police give wide berth; the person the old women invoke when children go missing and the mothers when they want to talk about the dangers of sluts and even sometimes the gloomy farmer when his crops fail? And then you might remember that such a person is so often spoken of simply as if she were more a force of nature or hell than anything else, safely stored away, by virtue of always remaining unexplored, as a stock image of the wild and the possible

58 and the beautiful baroque. And distant such a person must be, so as to be beautiful and wild and brimful with potential. It is not that you will be annihilated if you come into contact with such force; it is rather that she—all she stands for—will not survive the collision with another. To explore a new land is to relearn the contours of old lands. Perhaps you get up and leave, neck prickling. You feel like a voyeur, though she has done nothing more than stare with her sorrowful eyes at the universe, and she can probably see you from wherever you hide away, with those fey eyes of hers. You have been afraid of her before and you have called her a mad little freak and a whore to joke with your friends. Turn back toward safer shores. It’s late, well, early on a weekend, and the distant music of a fete calls from town. But you may stop, turn, and wonder if you can get to her islet somehow, past the rocks on which waves crash and sirens may sing and past the anti-submarine and –aircraft missiles said to hide among the sea-almonds along the islet, though you see no such things, yes, if you skim the water like Hermes and find your way into the legendary labyrinth of her decaying lighthouse castle studded with seashells and periwinkles, brushing aside the thousands of ghosts that flutter through its misty halls, ghosts of faces you recognize from the town and villages and once even your own seems to go by, and you will follow the scent of salt and rot to the dark starlit-flecked room where she stands. You will grab her from behind, perhaps she is pretending not to have noticed, or perhaps she has turned when you enter the room, her impossible gaze fixed upon you, and yet her eyes have stopped glowing when they fall on the intruder, and you realize with a jolt you have never seen her up close, is this even her, never realized she has a fleck of five-o’clock shadow beneath her nose she must assiduously shave, never realized how long and pale her arms are and how slim she looks in her wrinkled ultramarine tennis shorts and baggy white shirt, somehow you expected her to be wearing a kimono with all the world embroidered across it and glass slippers with stiletto heels. And yet she is a marvel. You cling to her in your sudden move, listen to the sound of glass shattering all around you like grandfather clocks breaking and see the stars silently falling outside the square slab of rocky window and smell something like the dark sweetness of clove cigarettes in her hair and espresso on her quivering lips, quivering like she has never been so touched; and you close your eyes and ears and nose and wait for the world to end, for your body to fade into ghost.

59 Juri’s Starship

Ah, what a present, a flower from another world, Madame Florizel would exclaim, light brimming in her dark eyes like suns, when Juri returned to Earth from her journey to an asteroid to deliver that fossilized gift to her, so Juri at least hoped would be the case when she finally did get into the rocket ship ready to go to space, and it was that same hope that had led Juri to the islet off the coast of St. Teresa to strike a deal with Verna, the green-haired young inventress who had created the ship that could go to the stars and beyond as well as a submersible that could explore depths of the ocean floor beyond the reach of any shipwreck’s bones, well, so Juri had heard, anyway, as Verna never showed her inventions, with the notable exception of the rocket, to anyone. Before the adventure of the flower, Juri had known Verna only as a legend. Because it was said she could do odd things even without technology, such as dive deeper and longer than anyone else on St. Teresa, possibly longer than anyone in the world, no need for air tank or even dive mask, almost everyone on the Caribbean island knew the grinning girl with the emerald tresses by name, and the superstitious locals believed Verna was some sort of demon woman or simply a being from another world. Juri herself did not have such impressive credentials, but she and Verna were united by love for the seemingly unattainable, in Juri’s case the love of her mistress Florizel—ah, such a perfect word! But Madame Florizel was really just her employer, as she lived alone most days and needed a maid to clean and cook, and by the visions of St. Anthony what a house it was, most maids would have taken one or three looks and run away with the eyes of tarsirs, you see, Madame Florizel was a retired paleontologist and owned a little dusty mansion full of specimens of the ancient world in glass jars and cases that had to be dusted and maneuvered around with an assassin’s precision, and speaking of assassinations, Madame Florizel had hired two security guards to patrol her halls and display rooms day and night, one for most of the day and one for the night, the first a slender man who had run away from Puerto Rico and the second a tall specimen of African origin. They winked at Juri as she worked, especially the Puerto Rican, and the African man, who worked at night, had once tried to follow her into her room, for the other requisite of being Madame Florizel’s maid was that you stayed there most of your life, sleeping in a yellow bedroom where the sad green beam of a lighthouse swept every so often, a shit job for most, I understand.

60 If I untangle myself from Juri’s side for a bit, if I flap my wings from her bedside, I can see how truly draining it was, cleaning that mazy museum of a house. And for decent, but not grand, pay, mind you. But Juri loved it, to hell with the security guards, no, she had fallen for Madame Florizel, what, you might exclaim, Madame Florizel was an older woman, her oval face tightening at its edges, hair not yet gray, as Juri knew because she combed Madame Florizel’s wavy loam-colored hair herself with a white wide-tooth comb that was like the jaw of some ancient creature and arranged her makeup shelves in the bathroom and would check each time for hair dyeing products. No one had ever attracted Juri the way her mistress had, no one her age or younger, and yet how many afternoons would the paleontologist say to her maid that she thought she was getting too old, Look at me, my dear Juri, I’ve turned into one of my specimens, Don’t be silly, ma’am, you look great, stunning, even, Juri would reply, and then the mistress would say, You only say so because I’m your employer, No, no, I would never, I really mean it, and Madame Florizel would laugh, her deep eyes staring and eyebrows furrowing at her reflection. And then she would reply Honest maids are hard to come by, to which Juri would smile and bow, unable to interpret just what the woman meant. Juri herself was twenty-six, her step light as a sylph. She was the color of cinnamon, eyes the green of cardamom pods, nose short, lips streaks of plum, she wore makeup each day to hide the dark freckles she thought made her look unintelligent, and she kept her black hair in a soft- but-firm bun, leaving a few corkscrew curls to hang and swish as she moved, she often wanted to let her hair down to her hips like the Pre-Raphaelite girl Madame Florizel kept in a painting in her room, but she was afraid lest she reveal the frizziness of those tight curls, and what if she sent something crashing down with a turn of her head, no no no, all in good time. Love can be relative, sudden as a macchiato or slow as the aging of a wine. Madame Florizel had never been married, so she had told Juri, though she had a child she did not like to talk about from some distant time of shadows. The fact had drilled through Juri like Professor Lidenbrock’s journey down to the center of the earth, and there were other things, like how her mistress smiled at and patted the palms of her guards, would she take one up to her room one day, both at once, was that just part of the deal, had it already happened, shit, but Juri repeated to herself it had not could not have happened because she kept watch as best she could, she slept little because the footfalls of the African security guard seemed to reverberate through the house and if not the house through the architecture of her dreams, she even did most of the

61 cooking so there’d be no need for a chef, and of all things Juri often hid a curved little russet- handled dagger in her shirt or purse, a dagger she had purchased years ago from a fair set up by a circus traveling through the Caribbean, back then she had had almost no money and knew something was wrong with her because she felt ready to swoon at the sight of certain older women and she had decided she would simply end her time on this Earth in dramatic style with a blade through the bosom, briefly she had considered running off with the circus but the thought made her feel even more of a freak, so she had set up a date and time for her execution, the date came and passed many times because she kept pushing it back, and then she saw an ad in the papers for work as a maid and that was how she met Madame Florizel. You might think Juri a bit mad, a bit too baroque, but you must understand that this was not an island where it was easy to love as one wished to love, this was the island where her sister Terra had been stoned into a coma by a group of mad people foaming at the teeth on a rumor that Terra was bisexual. This was not even a place of barbarian murder, like some other islands, but there were still fanatics here who did as they wanted, fuck the police, and the police were sometimes in on it, too. Generally the island was safe but it was getting worse, and Juri knew she should try to flee, try to fly away. But she remained. That damned Madame, she thought in her most agonizing moments. Juri had asked herself before if it were all an illusion, some misguided desire for the parents she still visited every few weeks in the country, or if her life were being played in minor key by some grinning demon; but when Madame Florizel took her wrist and held it against her neck and smiled, oh, she was so happy to have found Juri, could she sense how Juri felt, yes; and when Madame Florizel had been sick and asked Juri to stay up with her in her room all night, and Juri found herself caressing her mistress to sleep and singing soothing songs as she thought only people in stupid stories did, yes, when all that happened, she just knew, she felt it in the way her hips adjusted and the way she felt flutters in her cheeks and the way she smoothed the curve of her eyebrows and the top of her bun almost without thinking, but Madame Florizel must not have known anything about it or simply said nothing. It was always easier to disguise love with women, it seemed, and Juri had almost given up on telling her. Perhaps the woman simply saw her as a sort of servant-sister, or even a daughter, Jesus Christ of William Miller, she had once said Juri was as innocent as a little girl, no, breaking the spell would be too painful, lest she find her own destruction beneath it, yes, she would remain in silent orbit the rest of her life, they’d grow old together, except, of course, that Juri would die decades later, but she had the dagger, so

62 it all worked out, yes, she told herself to stay sane each night alone with her thoughts, quiet clockwork love. No one needed to know, not her sister or parents, although she had found herself confessing her desires to a replica of an archaeopteryx once while she swept. No, she would simply listen and smile as Madame Florizel told her the stories she loved to relate about each specimen, especially the trilobites, did she know that the Indians of Utah had worn them as amulets against evil and that Europeans had thought they were the instruments of the great wizard Merlin, they represented the transition into creatures with skeletons and complexity, yes, Juri would smile as the woman smiled, and she would caress her dreams, cultivate her garden of ghostly wisteria and bluebells, since, after all, it is perhaps our dreams above all that make us human, and maybe fulfilling dreams is the worst thing we can do in the end, maybe she had never really evolved beyond the boneless Ediacaran life forms, where the jellyfish was the most advanced of all, ah, yes, she would sigh and die with blue eyes for the cursed arrangement of things in her brain that had made her so, these poor palaeophilias. But then it so happened that one month ago, a group of astronomers in Hawaii claimed they had found vegetation growing on an asteroid near Mars, so bizarre, it should have been a barren icy world, and indeed their find may have simply been the frozen remains of flowers and trees that had once grown there, or perhaps it was the product of something profoundly alien, of another universe, even. These claims had not been corroborated by any reputable organization, and Juri knew nothing about astronomy, indeed had not been able to go to college and thought herself dumb, but she did know that Madame Florizel, though she chuckled at the news reports, was excited. If I could see such a thing in my lifetime, the paleontologist said, oh, I’d be the happiest girl in the world. And so it was, weeks later, that Juri ended up in the cockpit of the Moonshine, the two- person-capacity silver-lilac spaceship that was shaped like a warhead and glittered with rings of pulsing light, her body swathed in a white and blue suit like something from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Verna was sitting beside her, her own body wrapped tight in a Merlot-red suit, and Juri felt again that there was something magnetic about the body beside her, something she could perhaps glean by the osmosis of company, or perhaps something else, but no, let that all go, the mayor was standing in front the vessel in a three-piece black suit with a great big red megaphone, and a crowd filled the streets. The vehicle itself was posed at the top of the tallest and widest building, as there was no public square big enough. What a cramped city. From

63 Verna’s islet, the starship had simply revved up and cruised forth a speedboat of the air, Verna had in fact flown it to the top of the building from her islet, for she had finally decided to make one of her inventions public. Juri had not told Madame Florizel; it had to be a surprise. Verna herself seemed surprised that the ship had flown to the roof. The inventress was Juri’s age, if not younger, and the thought crossed Juri’s mind that maybe this was not so much the public unveiling of her works as their first attempted use altogether, but she stifled those dangerous speculations, as she knew she herself was no genius. In fact, she reasoned, the riskier the operation, the more it would be worth, for her and her mistress both. How had she got involved with Verna, well, Verna was an island legend of sorts, she lived with her silent mother in a strange property on a small islet just off the coast of St. Teresa, and it was said that this was where she kept a six-foot Humboldt squid for wrestling and where she developed vehicles and substances that defied all things known to humankind, typical insular exaggeration, perhaps, but her dreadlocks were kelp-green and her eyes sometimes had a faint glow like phosphorescence, so who knew. She was rarely seen. Verna gave scuba diving lessons every now and then and, when not under the waves, could be seen skipping over the waves from islet to island on her speedboat, The Snark, truly a free being, and whenever Juri ventured out to buy groceries or check on her sister in the hospital, she would pass the long way by the sea wall, hoping for a glimpse of the green-haired enigma. Only a week ago, she saw on a poster in town that Verna had decided to publicly unveil her personal starship, a lilac-silver device shaped like a nuclear warhead. She was looking for a copilot to use on the mission to the asteroid with the flowers, within moments of reading Juri knew she had to be that pilot and called the number in the ad, and she ran down to the seawall with her cell pressed to her ear so she could look at the islet as she called, as though that would help, the endless superstitions of the infatuated. Juri twirled and untwirled the curls hanging from her bun as the phone rang and rang with static in-between, her heat thudded as fast as it had in school when she had suddenly been called on to answer a question, she knew she would never be the first to call for the position of copilot, and then she realized she had never even heard Verna’s voice, indeed, she had thought the whole affair might be a scam and still somewhat did, but what did it matter. Four rings, five rings, six, seven, surely no one would—and then a low voice answered, Who’s this. Juri stammered out that her name was Juri Mononoke and was this Verna she was speaking to, and then the voice asked if she wanted to be the copilot on the starship

64 enterprise and Juri said yes twice, Very well, the voice replied, as though a rite were being performed by women in robes, can you meet me by the jellyfish sign by the seawall at 5:30 p.m., Sure I can, Mrs. Um, Verna, and I know what you look like, but how will you recognize me, the voice on the other end laughed and said, I can see you right now, if that’s you on the cell phone, Juri froze and looked around but no one was in sight, not even in the clouds, Where are you, No need to worry about that, Juri, but if you want to be my copilot, you need to bring me something that shows I can trust you, Like what, money, No, said the voice, where do you work, Erm, I help out at Madame Florizel’s home, Ah, the paleontologist, the voice perking up, wow, perfect, hmm, let me tell you what—if you truly want to be the one I will take on this journey, bring me one of her trilobites, You must be mad, I can’t do that, Well, then, deal off, No, wait, please, ask for something else, money, do you want money, the voice laughed and rejoined, Sometimes, to be trusted, you need to do things untrustworthy people do, it’s all context, I know you don’t know me personally, Juri Mononoke, but all I need is to see that you’ve taken the specimen, you can bring it right back after, Really, Ah, so that’s fine, then, is it, Well, Juri said, and then the conversation trailed off. No, I’d need to keep it, the voice said, for something I’m building, I was looking for one and you just came right along, how about that, Really, um, well, you said you have to keep the trilobite, Look, just bring it to me, or you will never fly that ship, what do you think this is, an amusement park ride, and then there was a disturbing moment of silence where Juri thought she had lost the voice, but then Juri murmured 5:30, right, and the voice laughed and replied, See you then, partner. Thus began an agonizing afternoon. All of Madame Florizel’s specimens were behind glass, and the trilobites she kept in a special cabinet that shone like a rainbow, and, moreover, Juri could not open most of the cases without them being unlocked, and she knew some if not all of the cabinets even had alarm systems if the glass was broken, only the guards and Madame Florizel had access to the alarm system shutdown and the sets of keys for each one. To make matters worse, Madame Florizel was out that afternoon, which seemed to make any decision of Juri’s all the worse, she walked by and around the trilobite case for nearly half an hour, and three times she tried nudging off the glass case to see if it was unlocked, no such luck, and each time she almost wailed, for she had just as well as stolen it just by trying to, and then she went to try the lady’s bedroom door, where the shutdown switch supposedly was, but the double doors were locked, as was usual when she left without instructions to clean, for the first time Juri thought

65 this an insult, didn’t Madame Florizel trust her enough, haha, how fatuous we can be. Juri figured she had lost the battle then, though she considered breaking the glass with items from the kitchen a few times or one of the pool sticks on the wall, but no, that was the most foolish of all. She trudged back past the framed prints of Fernand Khnopff and the imitation statues of Venus, over the long halls with their oriental rugs, down the spiraling stairs. On her way back to her room, where she planned to lock herself up to rethink why she was thinking about all this, she saw the security guard, his set of keys jingling, and then she had a terrible idea. It was painful, of course, she had never been able to find pleasure like that, but she faked it as well as she could, it wasn’t all bad but it was dry and more painful at first then she had remembered and the guy didn’t smell so good and Jesus, men were ugly beasts. But when he was done, she told him he should go take a shower, she would come join him after, he grinned and hung up his uniform on the back of her door, as if he lived there, and then he went into the shower, she shut the door and said she was coming, then she threw on some sweat pants and an oversized Nike t-shirt, took the keys, and ran to the glass case, thank goodness each key was numbered, she fumbled with them, come on, open, is this the right numbering system after all, and then she got it, a soft chink, how quiet destiny can be, she opened the glass case, took out one of the trilobites, relocked the door and then fled, thank goodness the idiot guard hadn’t come out after yet, in fact, she heard him singing, Lady Godiva alone knew what was he doing in there. She ran out to the seawall, now eight minutes late, and when she reached, Verna was waiting. Up close, Juri was astonished at Verna’s appearance, which seemed at once beautiful and uncanny, magnetic, even, a fey being with slender white limbs in wrinkled denim short shorts, a port-red tank top, a cloud-white knapsack, and with faintly yellow eyes, but this was about her mistress Madame Florizel, Juri reminded herself. It’s okay, Verna said—same voice—before Juri could breathe an apology, you sounded like you would be late on the phone, I’m just glad you came, and I take it this is the thing, Yes, here, Wonderful, wonderful, So, All right, then, Verna said, grinning, let’s head over to my place so I can get you acquainted, Oh, Did you leave something on the stove, Um, no, it’s just that I, well, ah, will I have to give you the trilobite, sorry if that’s stupid, it’s just that I’m not very smart and might have missed what you said, Verna looked her over, then said, Ah, still on about that, but I understand, no need to lose your job over petty theft, yes, you can bring it back for now, but I might ask you for something again later, I consider this a piece of half-trust. Juri was

66 about to say that was unfair, but she was really too flustered to think, the sky was dotted with flashes of light like fireworks before her, and Verna’s face softened. Go on back, she said, and put it back, and let’s meet up later, like 7:30, if you can, and I’ll give you dinner, and here, let me get you some water, you look ready to drop, and you don’t want to drop that bag, and do you need help getting this back to your house, Yes, please. Verna smiled, took Juri’s arm, and led her to the nearest pipe, held the bag while Juri drank, and then she gave it back, shook Juri’s hand, and then went off with her back to the mansion, outside which the Puerto Rican guard was waiting, his hair a wet tangle and face inscrutable. Juri’s eyes widened as Verna removed what looked like a blowgun of all things from her knapsack, took aim, and shot twice, the first missing and the second hitting the guard in the neck, he fell to his knees in an instant, and Verna ran over him, pulling the dart out. Not lethal, she said, go on, hurry up, Juri ran inside, thanking her profusely and trying to hide her watering eyes, she was shaking so hard she could barely put the trilobite back, and in twenty minutes, the guard had woken up and Verna had disappeared and Juri had clipped his set of keys back to his suit. He had no memory of how he got knocked out but must have known something had happened before because she had to promise him she would have sex with him whenever he wanted or he would expose her for running off and taking his keys and for whatever she had done, she could tell he didn’t really know, how could he, but she was almost in throes nonetheless and it was only when she promised that he backed off. Juri knew she could probably get him fired if she told Madame Florizel he had tried to rape her or something of the sort, but he scared her less as he was, and maybe this was just the price she had to pay, maybe she should just quit and run away, no, she wouldn’t do that. Like Scheherazade, she had to make her story go on in some way. At worst, she always had her dagger. I—there are many names for me—do not get on so well with my sibling, Love, and far be it from me to pass judgment on those I haven’t set to sleep and decay. But I really do not like the worlds where my sibling cannot move around freely, and where people feel the need to call on me early. * The starship exploded seven seconds after takeoff. A terrible blast, shattering the panes of glass of the buildings as its pieces plummeted. A blossom of smoke and flame in a sky as blue as Gershwin’s rhapsody. Juri had been flung out, her hair had come undone, her eyes wide, cheeks

67 crisscrossed with blood, ears ringing like wedding bells, and what was strangest of all, aside from the ship failing, was that time seemed to have slowed down, as if she could see each window shatter, each spark of fire in the wreck above her, could hear the wind of her fall. It wasn’t just a movie effect, then. And yet, what did such reflections matter, she had failed, she could no longer do the one thing that could never be beaten by anyone, not even by the security guards, she had failed…. For two weeks, she had skipped sleep and breaks to visit Verna, learning how to go to the bathroom in her bodysuit, how to operate the ship, what outer space was likely like, what not to do, what to do if they encountered anyone trying to stop them, how to avoid death via radiation, hourly exercises and lectures that left Juri with sunken hollows of eyes and dragging feet, all this combined with the advances of the guard, who only stopped when he saw that she was a wreck, his eyes became pitying. What’s wrong, he asked one day, The labors of love, she muttered, Love, Not you, I love my work, Well, it seems it doesn’t love you back, he finished, but Juri had been steadfast, she knew it was madness, madness like that damned lighthouse beam, moreover, she could hardly look her mistress in the eyes since she had taken the trilobite, every footfall Madame Florizel made now reverberated like the beating of the heart under a floorboard. But this would be the greatest find of all time, that alien flower, a flower she had of course never seen but that looked in her mind like some wondrous fossilized blossom, its frozen petals glittering with the dust of a thousand stars, its stem perched upon a slab of black stone, and she would cut out the flower from the asteroid in a neat square and return with it like a hero and she saw in her mind that flower one day being placed behind a grand glass case hanging above all the others perhaps from the roof like a marvelous chandelier, oh, those weeks were a labor indeed, only such circumlocution can describe the flow of Juri’s thoughts. And as much as she told herself in tears at night and even in her own dreams that she was a stupid cursed ugly girl-woman thief, she never once thought the ship would simply explode, maybe it would simply not start or would run out of fuel before it reached, but explode, just like that, my god what is the worth of our efforts, and even as she dropped, she wondered what had happened, was it a trick, was this the fruit of her accursed biology…. She was still dropping. She looked round in horror, where was Verna, everything had fallen and fallen apart, even her dagger, which she’d slipped into her tote, had flown through a window, and then, as her body turned, Juri saw Madame Florizel down in the crowd, so far

68 away, so so far, was it even her, her mistress, Juri’s mind went wild, her mistress, seed of this idiot quest, only a man was usually this stupid, how had she ever conceived of this, did she think she was some great figure from a book or an adventure show, and then suddenly she was just above the streetlamps and the din of the crowd was all around by goddess was that her mistress right there in front her and then she hit something hard with a squelch like a fruit and the world slipped away. And I slowly turned my gaze toward her. * When she could see again, she was in her room. She was so surprised that she didn’t know what to make of it. Her first thought was that she had survived, and then that she had died and only thought she’d survived, how deceptive the afterlife can be, and then the door opened, oh no, it was time for her to be judged for the sins of her biology, and to her horror, she saw a being who looked just like the African security guard. Is everything all right, oh, you woke up! he said with a smile, we were so worried…oh, okay, yes, ma’am. He waved and shut the door, and it was then Juri realized someone else was in the room. Her mistress. I should fire you for such foolishness, Madame Florizel said after a moment. It would only be right, Juri let out, though she felt as though the footfalls were reverberating through her again now in a cavernous echo, and she found herself clutching the bed sheets. There was a pause. And then the lady sighed and said with exasperation, They put that woman, Verna, behind bars, why would you get involved with someone like her, and in something so dangerous, are you mad, did you ever stop to think what your actions would mean to anyone else, and Juri looked at the bedspread, unable to look at her mistress as though she were a puppy guilty of a terrible crime, Was anyone injured, she asked, Besides you, Madame Florizel replied with a smirk in her voice, Yes, besides me, Nothing serious, just some burns and cuts, the mayor is fine, what’s worse is the destruction of public property, Juri looked up, but that’s what Verna is being charged with, as well as trying to fly that thing without proper authorization from the government, You don’t need authorization for the thing I was going for, Juri replied, glaring, and I just made a mistake, I understand, I’ll pack my bags and leave as soon as I have to. Her eyes watered and lower lip trembled. She expected Madame Florizel to chuckle or even cackle for some reason. But instead, she put her hand on Juri’s shoulder and looked her in the face, Don’t say such foolishness, that’s

69 worse than what you did, and besides, would the person who ran to catch you really have taken away your job (although a bystander actually caught you, almost broke his back), I said I “should” fire you, not that I would, Juri’s eyes shot open, yes, the paleontologist continued, I know why you did it, and before you fell, you made me feel something so good inside my chest, I hope it wasn’t an ulcer, Juri said, looking away, You’ll give me one if you keep being so aggressive, I’m not being aggressive, Yes, you are, No, Well, then, you can pack your bags if you like, Wait, please, I’m sorry, I’m just so confused, she reached out and grabbed Madame Florizel’s hand as she got up from the bed, and then the lady smiled, gave her wrist a gentle squeeze, and said, See you tomorrow, my dear. Juri couldn’t help herself, she smiled so much wider than she had in recent times that her cheekbones creaked like old door hinges and she began to cry and wiped away her eyes with the long sleeve of her pajamas. I’m sorry, Juri said, I just feel so happy, No, no, I understand, Madame Florizel said, you can ring the bell if you need anything, I’ll be sure to, ma’am, Don’t call me that, dear, call me anything but that, and by the way, I like seeing your freckles, and with that she moved to the door, and then Juri could no longer contain herself and called out, Please, I love you, then she was red-eyed again and said I’m sorry, I just had to tell you, please don’t judge me, You love me, With all my heart, which is beating so fast I think I’m going to die, Are you all right, hold on. Madame Florizel had rushed back to the bed and put her head against Juri’s chest, hair brushing her breasts, and then she smiled and said, I’ve known how your heart beats for a long time, And you didn’t fire me, Why would I fire someone who loves me, They do it in most big companies, I’m not a big company, but I need your company, Do you mean that, Of course, Is it just me, Just you what, I mean, do you feel the same way about me, and then the mistress lowered her gaze for a moment, running her hand along the folds of the bedspread, and said, There are many layers to how we feel, most only see the top, where they make metaphors about gardens and trees and flowers, but I like what comes below, That’s where the fossils are, And the best place to explore, at this, Juri hesitated, nervous to touch her again, and then she said softly, I’m glad, Let’s just leave it at that, Madame Florizel leaned forward, kissed her nose, and then got up and left. Feel better, she said as the door shut. Juri remained sitting up, hands at her cheeks, for five minutes. She tried to push herself off the bed to go to the mirror, but pain surged through her body and she had to lie down again. Madame Florizel must have softened the truth, she mused, because her ribs felt like the planks of

70 a shipwreck, she could again hear the ringing of bells in her ear even though she had not touched the brass one on her bedside table, her heart was once more pounding harder than usual, and suddenly she was terrified at the idea that she had been delusional during the whole wondrous tête-a-tête, would she be fired because she was unable to clean, would she be able to be what Madame Florizel needed, and to top it all, she had failed to get the flower, if the flower even existed. But it wasn’t about flowers, was it, and then she remembered the security guard, shit, was the other one still there, how much could he know, he knew her body inside and out, and he might be back, no, she would definitely kill him if he tried anything, this was not his house. But she had acquired the bell, and maybe there would be more bells to come, if the ringing ever stopped in her ears. She slowly turned herself to lie on her side, rubbing the hand her lady had squeezed, and after a long time, the ringing seemed to fade, and she smiled. * I appear as Juri’s eyes close. She does not hear the flap of my wings; few do. I can’t help smiling at her stillness; so many of them, from stars to humans, are in throes at my arrival. I feel bad to come now, but I’ve no choice. The time always arrives when I know, somehow, I must. I have been in her mind for ages, sometimes so long stuck in there that my thoughts have become all jumbled up with the myriad streams of her own. Thus the prose of this entry. Nowhere as bad, though, as Finnegan, who was the most extraordinary of thinkers even when awake and riverrunning away, or as mad as Ahab and his crew, which died so suddenly, except for that strange one. Perhaps it’s appropriate Lady Death, as some call me, can get bundled up in the labyrinths and Lady-of-Shalott netting of certain minds, since some believe I am not so much real as a personification, a figment of the imagination in a wounded brain, and sometimes I imagine so myself, mystery of mysteries, my preferred name is Enigma, incidentally…but I digress. I put a hand over her forehead, brushing the stray curls back. She is already too gone to notice me. Ah, Juri. Juri, Juri. You did well enough, well enough, indeed, and then I give her my quick kiss, and that is that, no more need to worry about sadness, happiness, quests, rests. It is enough to try. You will die and fade even if you don’t, if you hadn’t; but you will last longer because you did, my dear.

71 The Guest

There once was a tall iron hotel which was crumbling at the sides and was the gray of someone who has not too recently died, its chimney piping white wisps of steam like a kettle, and to this dismal hotel one day came a guest who said he wanted nothing more than to stay as long as he possibly could, and the manager almost said no because the guest was a strange little thing in a red blazer and slippers made of wood, and before he could say no the guest had taken the key and disappeared into the elevator, Wait, stop, you can’t go up there, that takes you to the incinerator where we keep the bears from Malaysia, and it was true that there were glowering sun bears, nine or more, who roamed the fifth and sixth and even the ninth floor, and it was also true that the fifth floor had once been nothing more than an incinerator where coal was burnt, a basement above-ground. But this did not stop the guest, it was not even clear he had entered the elevator, for when the old metal doors with their vine designs began to creak shut, there was no one inside, but the guest had been so small and strange that perhaps he simply had blended in with the grayness, red coat notwithstanding. The manager was ready to race after him but the bellhop, who had never seen a guest before, was ecstatic, Let him go through, sir, he’ll be the first to give me a tip in twenty-seven years, and it won’t be a growl like I get from those bears, and the manager sighed and let it be, the hotel was hardly a hotel but a hotel it could not be if it denied any guest a stay because he was an unusual thing, how unusual he would soon find out, for that night there began an impossible racket from the sixth floor, where the guest had taken up residence, though all the rooms there had no furniture and were gray and filled with cobwebs like the Lady of Shalott’s room was filled with a labyrinth of thread, the racket was the roaring and snarling and even howling of the bears, and the bellhop in his horror was sure the guest had been devoured, Why would he take a key there, the fool, but the manager told him no, that’s how the bears sing, it just means they’re in a state of nirvana, and indeed soon came the tinkling of spoons from the kitchen and the crash of plates for cymbals and someone playing a chandelier like a xylophone, this went on all night long, a steady stream of servants with long white aprons fluttering like curtains from the kitchen carrying up empty plates and cutlery folded in string to the sixth floor on order from the guest, only one returned and he told the whole tale, They are putting on a circus, sir, a circus like I’ve never seen in all my years, and the next morning when the noise abruptly ceased the guest appeared at breakfast with no expression you would expect

72 from a ringmaster, no expression at all on that strange creature’s face if it had a face at all, it simply sat at the dining table, letting loose clouds of dust and chalk and old bones, and without asking for food he began to eat the tablecloth, twirling it around his claw like an enormous strand of spaghetti on a fork and sucking it down like a vacuum. And when it turned to the manager, who was staring with the silence of a mushroom, the guest seemed to smile, his smile said I am pleased, you have done well, I am here to stay as long as the service is this excellent, it was almost like a Zen koan but it could not quite be because the manager thought he understood something more though not fully, and so he smiled back despite the fact that his teeth were grinding down to their gums, the bellhop clapping his spidery hands like an anime cheerleader, echoing claps that flew like bats through the endless forgotten corridors of that gray world. This was simply how it had to be. And so it was for the all the rest of time the manager and his bellhop and their phantasmal staff were around, the one hundred and ninety years in total, the sudden guest simply remained, doing what he did until he had reduced the hotel to a skinny shipwreck of a building like a demolished Sagrada Familia, revealing only that he was a distant relation of one Mr. Gorey, and through all this he remained in his gray little room without a window, and even the manager’s skeleton knew he was going nowhere, for that was simply how it had to be, and we are not enough of enough to change the universe.

73 Follow

So, how do you like it, Juniper asked. I said, how do you like it? The room flashed blue, violet, scarlet as she leaned toward Tony, her chin-length Merlot-dark curls brushing her small cheeks, the music—random techno, house, goa, psybient, genres Tony had just or never heard of—making the white walls of the house shudder like a child who had chugged an espresso. It’s okay, he said. What? I said I’m having a great time! Oh, are you really? Her eyes lit up. I’m glad. I wasn’t sure you were enjoying—I said, I wasn’t sure you were enjoying yourself. She smiled and took his hand. Come on, I want you to meet Mum. Remember I told you about her? My friend from high school? Exactly, she’s right over there. Um…I have to—lemme just refill my drink. What? My drink. He chuckled. I think my tolerance went up in the last ten minutes. Oh, sure. She laughed and started with him, but then a tall guy Tony had seen before tapped her shoulder. The man was dressed as an absinthe fairy—or, at least, that was Tony’s interpretation. The fairy’s shirt said Absinthe; but, for some reason, he had painted a massive eye in his forehead, and his unpainted eyes were covered by shades. Tony figured he could play off having turned too quickly to have seen the guy, so he went back to the table he’d been lingering by for the last five minutes—he had been at the party for fifteen—and stared at the rows of bottles and cups, their sides flickering in the strobe light. He glanced back at her as he added more wine to his glass. She was talking to the absinthe fairy and laughing, and he had one hand on his miniskirted hip and a big grin on his face. Tony looked back at his glass. Even more than sixteen days ago, when he’d first met her in person, he felt her astonishing beauty. It didn’t matter that she was dressed as a bloodstained ghost; that somehow added to her impossibility, the way she was just there at his side at this house Tony never would have known existed otherwise. Impossible. Tony felt a pressure in his chest, like a strange flower blooming between his lungs. He took a drink from his glass, then swore; he’d got wine on the front of his suit, for he had decided at the last minute to dress as

74 Tony Montana. He knew his cousins from the island would’ve laughed at him, but in a good way, for once—he was finally being the gangsta the rest of them already were, twenty-two-year- old G, a sexy motherfucking bitch at his side—no, fuck that, he couldn’t think of her like that, and he’d tried to, even when he described her as such to the only cousin he still talked to on Facebook. lmao u real lie, his cousin had typed back. u doh have no girl. u still a gud likkle boy. The wine smelled strong. For a moment, he glanced around the room—it was flickering so much that she might miss him if he ran, he could do it now, he could go out the door and never come back, never humiliate, mortify her— But he waited, sipping the wine, cheeks and neck tingling—maybe he could pass it off as blood, and who was he kidding, the people here were fucked up anyway—and then he walked back to her. The fairy nodded at him with a smile; Tony gave him a stony-faced nod in return. Okay, he whispered to her. She took his hand again, smiled, and pulled him into the dark-lit room, and he followed, glimpsing her beaming profile, but it wasn’t hers, it was theirs, and he followed, not knowing what he would say, who he would say it to, if they would understand a shred of what he was saying in his foreigner’s accent and even more so under all this music he was bobbing his head to to make the people around him less suspicious—he knew she didn’t care, though, it would all be fine, he would follow her like Tennyson’s Ulysses followed his madness, and then yes, then, then he would know whatever there was to know.

75 Governorship

1 His physician, Smith Hawkins, found him lying facedown in the cabin. The first thing Hawkins assumed was that he had drunk the last of the rum, for Sir William Stapleton was a mad Irishman with as great a thirst for the massacring of Indians as he had for liquor. But there was only one bottle in sight, and Hawkins wondered if the man might simply have died from the sheer ecstasy of the hours he’d earlier spent slicing the limbs off Amerindians. Hawkins tiptoed over the floor—unnecessary, given the crash-boom of the guns and fireworks outside—and rolled Stapleton over, at which point he discovered that the Governor General of the Leeward Islands had an enormous erection at a right angle so perfect that he had reflexively recalled a diagram from Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. “Tomorrow,” Stapleton murmured, voice thick and jagged at the edges. His eyes were dark and sad, like those of a sperm whale. “What happens tomorrow, Sir?” Hawkins said, trying to keep his eyes away, though he had not missed that the Governor General had placed his hand on the lump in his breeches. “Tomorrow.” “Yes, Sir.” “That’s when we get the ress of ’em,” Stapleton said. He got onto one elbow, blinking the haze from his eyes. “That’s when we go back…back to where we killed that Warner dog.” “Ah,” Hawkins said. He knew the story well. It had been December of 1674, two years after Stapleton had been elected to the position of Governor General of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. Scarcely two days before Stapleton’s attack—indeed, the reason for his attack—a vast militia of Caribs, the Amerindians known among themselves as Kalinagos, had suddenly appeared in Antigua, firing arrows, swinging clubs like swords, releasing a boa constrictor, and setting fire to the buildings, their hair whipping like that of anime characters, eyes gleaming like the paradise of Prester John. They had set fire from a distance with burning arrows. Their bodies had been smeared with castor oil and the orange dye of roucou that they used to repel mosquitoes and gnats, and this had given them the appearance of demons. Still more horrific was the fact that they had brought with them a gargantuan Negro, his nose rotted off from syphilis, who must have escaped to Dominica and been kidnapped. Stapleton had seen them dyed as such before but

76 in the firelight it took on a new intensity, and he’d had to run around firing at them with a great eel of shit slithering around his legs, remembering his first days in the Caribbean over a decade ago, when he’d sailed with Tobias Bridges’ regiment as a young man to save Nevis from the Dutch and the French, and wondering now amidst the shouts curses crackle-of-orange-dark- flames if this would be the time the infidels won, the time he lost…. This had not been the first time the Indians attacked Antigua. They had begun in 1668, when a British ship flying a French flag captured Caribs in Dominica, the enigmatic island where colonists went to chop wood and collect river water; in retaliation, Caribs from Dominica and St. Vincent, the two islands the Europeans had found too difficult to properly colonize, massacred the British in Antigua, St. Lucia, and Barbados. The Amerindians’ attacks had been so frequent, indeed, that Antigua had almost been abandoned, and 1674 had been the year the citizens pledged Stapleton to eradicate the Caribs living in Dominica, for it was primarily in that gothic island of Lovecraftian mountain ranges that they’d taken refuge, as the island was indeed so rocky and tenaciously forested that only the Indians, pirates en route to Saba, French criminals, and escaped slaves could penetrate its interior; it may well have been this primeval world that later gave rise to the floating island of Knuckles the Echidna—but that is in another timeline. We shall return to timelines. Despite the difficulty of entering the island, a half-British man had briefly become its leader. Thomas Warner, son of Sir Thomas Warner, Governor of St. Christopher, and a Carib woman who had been alive for two centuries, had run away to Dominica after his father died. He had been abused for his brown skin and dark Indian hair, and when he found the Caribs, they welcomed him as their leader. He was soon ordering attacks on other islands, and he was responsible for the Antigua massacre. His half-brother, Colonel Philip Warner, who had earlier protected him from the violence of his step-mother, rode in an armada of sloops with Sir William Stapleton to Dominica two days later. Stapleton was not a handsome man; he was large and blubbery, like a strange pink whale, his gray jacket and breeches stretched tight across his sweaty skin, his flowerlike white cravat damp. In the sun, he wore a great black hat. His skin had become more and more wrinkled since Hawkins had known him, and some would say he was already beginning to show signs of the distemper that would kill him three years later in Paris, in one version of history. But his eyes still gave off a young, devilish light, especially when he spoke of the Indians, and it was when

77 Hawkins had first seen this that he knew Stapleton truly despised the heathens. Despite his size, Stapleton was strong and could move with sudden speed, and he had proved himself willing to attack anyone, even his deputy governor, if he believed himself falsely accused of some injustice. He had a force, something of the Cthuluesque, in him. During journeys to other islands, he kept on his shoulder a Senegalese green monkey he had been given by Sir Richard Dutton in Barbados, for some idiot had brought a collection of the simians down in the 1670s and they had taken over the island. Stapleton’s monkey was young and small, and it had acquired a permanent limp from Stapleton flinging it at walls in fits of anger. But he would also recite his speeches about plantation politics to it, and it was said by the soldiers that Stapleton had trained it to fire a pistol with infallible accuracy; indeed, I believe the monkey would have given Vash the Stampede a run for his money, were Vash to leave his desert universe for this one. The Governor’s wife walked the monkey through town with a lilac gingham ribbon for a leash, and it sometimes cuddled with its owners at night when they were fast asleep. Colonel Philip Warner was lean and limber, with the grinning visage of an English Don Juan. It was hard for him not to smile. When they reached the island, he found his brother and presented him with seven bottles of wine. The French routinely gave the Caribs cognac, and Thomas Warner did not want trouble, so he accepted and drank. The wine had been laced with arsenic, some soldiers claimed, and the Caribs were soon drunk and giddy. There had been a strange woman who pulled a cage behind her, in which was a boa constrictor with the head of a boy, and even that offspring of Melusine from another mythos was grinning inside his cage after two hours. A great fire was burning. Philip Warner took his brother aside, then slit his throat, at which spurt of blood the Englishmen rushed at the Caribs, flintlocks cracking and bayonets flashing. The monkey had turned its head and covered its eyes. Now, almost ten years later, Stapleton had got the King’s permission to slaughter the Indians in St. Vincent and Dominica, and what a firelit massacring it had been today in the island named after Vincent of Saragossa! The French, whose missionaries had been decimated by Caribs in St. Vincent, were still building settlements there, and they had given the Caribs flintlock pistols filled with nails to use on Stapleton’s men in 1681. The Governor would set sail for Dominica tomorrow. “Sir,” said Hawkins, “do you want me to get you anything? Some men and the brown girls were asking for you.”

78 “To hell with the mongrels. What did the men want?” “Oh, they just wanted, erm, to let you know the last of the Indians we took were in the hold.” Hawkins did not actually know this; he had seen the men putting the Indians and their canoes into the boat, but he did not know whether or not they were done. “That’s all, Sir.” “Call in my wife, then,” Stapleton said. He propped himself up on an elbow, then pushed himself into a cross-legged position. He rubbed his cheeks and smoothed down his hair. “Where is she?” Hawkins tried to hold back the pink in his cheeks. An hour ago, he had seen the Governor’s wife, Anne Russell, follow a soldier into his cabin. They had only been in the island for a day and a half, docked by the half-ruins of a French settlement, and he didn’t know the soldier. “I believe she may be cooking more of the pepperpot,” he said, hands clasped like de Zurbaran’s Francis. “That whore.” Hawkins paled. “Sir?” “Pepperpot…a woman only makes that when she wants to have better sex.” “Ah, of course, I see.” Stapleton laughed. “Such a lad you are, Smith. Nineteen, right? You haven’t been long enough in these heathen islands, but you’ll learn from ’em soon enough, right. You know what, my boy, call in my secretary, as I’ve letters to write.” Hawkins smiled and took a step to the side. He swallowed and stared at the Governor. “You’re still here? Why, what do you want, boy?” “Um. Well, Sir, I wanted to ask—I wanted to present you with, um, this, Sir.” He unearthed a letter wrapped in gingham ribbon from the inside of his coat. “What is it?” “A request from me, Sir.” Stapleton laughed, a hoarse, porcine emanation. He opened the letter and smoothed the parchment inside. “This here is a request for land?” Hawkins stepped back and began to turn, hands spinning crescents in the air. “I can come back later, Sir, and I apologize for the impudence of my intrusion—” “Oh, hush it. It’s land you want? And servants?”

79 Hawkins nodded. “You no longer want to be a doctor, eh, boy? You want plantations like mine, slaves like mine, a job like mine…you want to be me, eh?” The doctor turned the pink of a grafted mango. “Well, I certainly hope I didn’t mean to imply all that, Sir. I just wanted, as you said so well, to try my hand at something different.” Stapleton looked at the ground for a moment. “So, you want to stay in the colonies, eh….Well, let me get back to you, then. I can get you what you ask, but it’s not an answer I can give this moment.” He smiled. “I admired your great-grandfather, you know. Sure you wouldn’t want to be on the seas with him, eh? Just kidding, boy, just kidding. I’ll get to you when I can.” Hawkins almost blushed, hands clasped to his chest like the Virgin. “Oh, thank you, Sir! I really do appreciate it ever so—” “Yes, yes, so you do. Now you’d said something to me about a mongrel wench, and I’ve yet to see her, or my wife, and while you’re at it, you could bring me some mauby with some of the rum from the storeroom, if you please. And then, I need to draft a letter.” Hawkins bowed and turned, trying to hold back his smile. “Right away, Governor.” 2 Hawkins was new to the islands. His great-grandfather had been Sir John Hawkins, who had designed the warship they were now using and who was the first to bring a shark from the Caribbean to England, after which the English stopped referring to the creatures as sea dogs, for the carcass he’d unveiled was larger than any canine they could imagine. The story haunted Smith at night. When the moon was dark the sea glittered with phosphorescence, and if he peered over the side of the boat, he would see the grinning eyes of reef sharks as they looked out of the water at him. The worst was when Stapleton had captured a vast slender fish with a head shaped like a hammer at St. Christopher and hung it on a pole; when strung out, Hawkins could see it was a shark the size of a young sea serpent. It bore the detached gaze of a scholar. Hawkins was short and slender like a girl, his hands wide and pale. He had once seen a cracked mirror, like some ancient Picasso, and he’d become almost in love with how it showed him what a real mirror did not. He had had a sore throat for as long as he could remember, and the idea of falling into a cold ocean unnerved him. To pass his time on land or in the ships, he buried himself in Vaughn’s translations of the Rosicrucian pamphlets, as well as the texts of Paracelsus, Harvey, fragments of Rhazes on

80 smallpox and measles, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s treatise on the plague, and the gargantuan Basilica chymica of Oswald Croll. He was fascinated by tales of assassinations, and he had memorized much of Giovanni Battista Porta’s treatise on toxins. Despite his rigid training at university, his beliefs as a doctor were misty; the startling environment of the Caribbean had already showed him diseases in the terrible relief of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. He had seen only two other doctors since he had arrived seven weeks ago, and when he introduced himself to one, he was reprimanded with a lecture on Erastus’ criticism of Paracelsus, for the older doctor believed staunchly in the four humors. Hawkins’ carrying case included three pounds of guaiacum and mercury for syphilis, quinine, ground pearls, all-purpose mummy powder from an Arab merchant he had met in London, laudanum pills, and a potpourri of salts and minerals. He had come as physician to the Governor. He would stay at his side for three months, and then he would return to England, in the healthful atmosphere of which he thought he would live out his years, perhaps joining the Royal Society. Now, all was hazy as a hot day. There had been a smoky allure to him about the tropics, despite the stories of pestilence and terror told by Sirs John and Richard Hawkins, and he often imagined himself replacing his dark jacket with the stolen raiment of some Spanish conquerors, commanding his own vessel, under commission (or even not under commission!) from the higher-ups. But he had chosen to study medicine, or it had chosen him; and this was the mad region where anything and everything seemed to occur, where six decades ago a hurricane had nearly destroyed the St. Christopher Stapleton now commanded, forcing the men to eat the flesh of turtles and bite the heads off lizards. That was nothing, of course, to the manmade catastrophes, like the astonishing massacres by Stapleton and his crew today. Hawkins had never smelt so much blood, seen so many burnt houses, the barber-surgeon flying about with his saw flashing, all moving to the mad cackling of the one in charge…. His duties varied from examining the hideous young James Stapleton and the newly conceived William Stapleton Jr. to carrying out Stapleton’s increasingly frenetic whims. The Governor had taken to Hawkins from the day he met him, ruffling his hair and grinning a grin as wide and sharp as some wanderer of the ocean floors. He made Hawkins deliver all of his food and drinks, and he refused to let the physician taste the food the Negro cook on the ship concocted until the Negro and two soldiers of his choice had tried it. “You can never trust these

81 African dogs,” he had said. “Their minds are as poisoned as the air they breathe in their savage villages.” Despite his paranoiac’s diet, the Governor’s body was a map of disorders. The first night with him in St. Christopher, Stapleton had lamented the return of a burning in his anus, and Hawkins had had to rub the Governor’s asshole with sugar water and then apply a leech to it. He had been astonished at the damp iciness of the Governor’s skin. Stapleton always cursed the heat, and whenever he was alone, he donned his beloved negligée. Soon the Governor was asking for leeches in his anus every night. His blood was dark, almost black, and reeked of ammonia, and the Governor himself smelled like urine, which Hawkins had been informed in London was the cologne of the colonies. There was a kind of filoselle softness in the atmosphere during the leech sessions, at which times Stapleton, reddening whenever Hawkins adjusted the creature, talked about corruption on the plantations and his fear of the headaches he often got and his disappearing hair under his wig and the laxity of life in the West Indies, the latter of which he blamed on the heat and the paganism of the slaves. Hawkins was surprised Stapleton hadn’t demoted the bony Negro the Governor used to shave him before bed each night. A part of Hawkins wished he had that position, as much as he would have wished to vomit at the idea of lathering up that leviathan neck. But it was just as well. He wouldn’t want the risk of having a blade against the Governor’s throat. Although, he’d once thought, I somehow doubt he would even die if I cut him open. * On his way to the storeroom, he came across Anne Russell. She was sitting by herself on the steps leading down to the cabin he’d seen her enter. Although he had seen the lords and ladies of the islands left to themselves before, it still made him wonder at the comparative laxity that would so allow a woman of English blood to move around unattended and unpunished—at least, Hawkins reflected, until someone was brave or malevolent enough to report her to the Governor. Despite his sultanic lust for the sword, Stapleton was not so foolish as to attack his wife, and so Hawkins wondered, as he gazed at her, how much he really knew about what went on—and, in fact, how much Hawkins himself knew. Hawkins, after all, had never been with a woman, and what did he know, really, of this primordial archipelago, where every corner, every hiss of wind, seemed to rattle some unopened chest. Stapleton had taken some Carib women in his raid with Philip Warner to be slaves, and those women had long drowned in the Lethe of

82 plantation life; he had heard—always, he was walking, sitting, and eavesdropping, for no one took notice of him—that Stapleton had kept one as a concubine for months. Hawkins smiled when he thought of Anne. She was the daughter of the Governor of Nevis, Colonel Randolph Russell, and had married Stapleton in June of 1671. Anne was a svelte affectionate woman who would hold Hawkins’ wrist and pat his head when he told her that her children were in good health. Always, she gave off the fragrance of sugarcane. She was not the prettiest woman he had ever seen, but her auburn hair was long and glossy, and she didn’t seem that much older than he was. Whenever she touched him, he felt his neck and ears turn orange- pink, and he would find himself with an uncomfortable feeling in his pants. A part of him silently loved her as though she were his sister, or a cousin. Though she touched him and smiled, her eyes were often sunken, less like moons than their craters, and visions of those sad eyes had occupied him for hours. At first, he tried to walk quickly past her, but she waved to him and stumbled up toward him. Her movements were oddly rounded, as though her center of gravity were on a seesaw. “Smith,” she said, eyes swimming like wet glass, “Smith, my love, how are you doing, my boy?” She touched his arm just below his elbow. Her breath was stippled with rum. He swallowed. Chills through the sides of his neck and shoulders. It was in that moment he knew he could take her to his room and do the barbarous and wonderful things he had often imagined in his day- and night dreams. She might not remember any of it, and he had the idea that she somehow wanted him to, though he told himself that this was likely nothing more than fantasy. “I’m well,” he said. “Where you off to, dear, this time of the night?” “Nowhere at all.” He chuckled. “The place people like me go to every day.” “Ah, a comic one,” she laughed. He swallowed, then looked around. There was silence for a long moment. Stapleton was down the hall, but there were enough ambient shouts, laughs, firework pop-cracks. “Can you, erm, well, come with me, Anne? I want to show you something, but only if you please.” “Ah, yes,” she said, rubbing his arm. “Of course, of course, my dear.” It happened very fast. Her breath tasted of liquor as she kissed him. He’d pulled back after three seconds but been pulled back in by her hands, and then he’d gone with it, long

83 nibbling kisses like he had never imagined, he began to wonder as she undressed him if her breath was inebriating him, yes, that had to be it, she was damp, was she feverish, he wondered in the in-between when he took off his clothes, what of the soldier, and then she was atop him and all was strange and inexplicable, vaguely irritating but soon that was lost, all was riverrunning, brillig as they gyred and gimbled in the wabe, she wore a delirious smile as they fucked, the room filled with the succulence of a cane field. When three and a quarter minutes had passed, he rolled away and lay against her for a few moments, her head in his arms, one of her arms draped over his chest, and he kissed the part in her hair, feeling the soft drum of his heart, but then he became aware of their nakedness again and got out of bed, unable to hold his smile. She had been chuckling; now, her eyes were half-closed. Darkness slipped over his face like a veil as he watched her lying there. “I’m sorry,” he whispered as he got back into his clothes. “I’m so sorry. I…” “Shut it, Willy, you malignant cur,” she chuckle-slurred. “Shut…just shut it, you damned heathen, and let me rest a bit.” Hawkins stared with widened eyes. He half-smiled, eyes reddening with tears, started toward her, and then closed the door and ran off through the ship, past the storerooms and a salmagundi of soldiers’ faces, to the gangplank. 3 Once ashore, he saw the bonfires the men were making and imagined himself suddenly rushing into the flames, or them leaping off the ground onto him like devils. He was sniffling and wiping his eyes. He would never forget what just happened, never forget her head in his arms, which he somehow loved the most. Madness. He felt something in his chest, or he had; it was like a swirling bit of mist, but it had melted away when she spoke, and now he felt its absence despite the fact that he’d never felt such a thing before tonight. It took him almost ten minutes to get to the storerooms, despite them being less than two minutes from Stapleton’s cabin, because once on shore he had twice tried walking towards a trail the French must have made through the trees that led to a cliff high above the Atlantic, where no one would find him, he knew, his body ripped into the unrecognizable by the great sharks and finished by the rest of the sea—but he had stopped himself from going all the way each time, holding his arms and licking his lips, eyes darting and rolling. That he had taken a laudanum-nutmeg-saffron-ambergris-musk pill, which always calmed him and eased his pains, made his distress all the more unnerving.

84 As he turned, he heard a strange sound: Brrrzzzp. It vanished as soon as it came, and it was soft, so he ignored it. It was a balmy night, harbinger of a June storm, and he had been speckled with sweat by the time he found his way back through the sea-almonds and fallen logs. It was bright, and even through the trees he could see enough of the path to follow it, but he had the strange sense that the path he was taking was making the same, instead of the reversed, twists and turns it had on his way to the cliff, though he could see the flickering of the fires and hear the occasional laugh on the wind every so often. When he returned to the ship, the first thing he noticed was that the air was cool and there was no one in sight, though he could still hear soft snatches of voice. The sky, which had been clouded, was starry, but it was more that; Hawkins had frowned and almost gasped, for he was looking at a sky in which he could recognize none of the constellations, and many of the stars were larger and more brightly colored, in violets and topazes and chrysolites and beryls, and then it was as if two of them were moving through the night, but flashing on and off every so often, red-white-black, red-white-black…and in the distance of the sea, he thought he glimpsed the impossible, a glittering horizon like a burning city….He shook his head, looked again—no change. He drummed on his thighs and sprinted for the storeroom. Damn these colonies, he thought, teeth clenched. Damn them! Even the storerooms, one for the officers’ liquor and another for Stapleton’s supplies, seemed somehow different, but Hawkins couldn’t place what it was. He cursed under his breath, wondering why he was getting alcohol for the Governor at all, and then he unlocked the liquor door. To his surprise, it was the wrong door—it was the supplies room. He knew without a doubt that he had opened the right door but it had ended up as the supplies room, anyway. “Or I must truly be mad,” he said to the room, smiling with the hollowed eyes of someone long-buried under the sea. He started to close the door, then saw the chest. It was an elaborate container of gold and gems Stapleton had collected from privateers. The chest was hidden under piles of clothing and supplies, as well as empty bottles of mauby and gin that had somehow ended up in the wrong room, but it was in plain sight for those who knew where to look. The Governor had distributed Spanish gold to his men in the past, and Hawkins was not clear on whether or not this chest was the only one he currently possessed. Despite their

85 short stay, the Governor only allowed himself and Hawkins into the room, which made him feel both empowered and emasculated. He closed the door behind him, hand tapping his right thigh, then kneeled and opened the chest. All it had for protection was a little smokehouse lock, which had not been properly closed. He had never opened it before, and his eyebrows arched at the amount of jewelry inside. It was as though he were looking at the spoils of the ferocious Henry Morgan, when he had beaten down the Spanish in Portobello. Hawkins pawed through it a bit, unearthing strands of pearl and magnificent coins. How easy it would be to take one, to stow away and start over, and with what had just happened, it would only be natural to run away…but, he whispered to himself, as he often did when alone, Stapleton would expect him to do that. In fact, he continued in a murmur, he might have delayed giving me my land to see if I would try to steal something in the interim. Although I already have. I must really be drunk from her; perhaps, that’s how it always happens. Why am I not happy. He was sure the Governor had been inebriated, but Hawkins’ paranoia had taken control of him. He swallowed, looked back at the closed door, looked at the chest, back at the closed door, did some more pawing, frowned, and then stuffed one, then three handfuls of small chunks of gold, surprised at their weight, into his coat’s pockets. At this, he felt chilled and giddy, so he was about to shut the chest and leave, the drinks forgotten, when he saw something glittering beneath the gold he’d removed. It was a ragged circular fragment of the most beautiful mirror he had ever seen, its glass letting off wisps of misty light like the band of Milky Way he could see on a clear night. Along its gem-freckled frame was an inscription in a variety of languages, and then, to his surprise, he found his own: All times are one. He picked the mirror up—it seemed weightless, like a thought—but then dropped it back into the chest, for in the glass he had seen the reflection of a man he did not recognize. He swore on the festering sores of Christ, then leaned back over the mirror, wondering if it had been some demonic device used by the Indians; and then he scolded himself for having adopted the Governor’s hasty judgment. Surely, it was his imagination, fevered at the prospect of escape—or it really was demonic, but because of what he’d done— He glanced again into its depths. The same face, that of a man in his late twenties of an indeterminable variety of races, stared back at him. Hello, the face said. The words appeared in his mind, each letter a misty rainbow. Hawkins gasped. The face in the mirror blinked, then chuckled.

86 Yes, Smith Hawkins—that’s you, right? I got the right one? Yes. Smith Hawkins, I am Prester John, and this is a fragment of my great mirror. “Prester John! The…the king of Ethiopia?” I was never any such thing, at least in no universe in which I have talked with any version of myself. But Smith Hawkins— “And the mirror that can see all nations,” Hawkins murmured, feeling the mirror’s frame. He bowed. “King John….Your mirror can see into other worlds, you said? What worlds?” Do not call me that, please. I am referring—well, you would not understand in your time, but if you think back to the theories of Anaximanes, Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, you may see. They spoke of many worlds, even infinite worlds. Know this, Smith Hawkins: there are many universes, worlds, and all events in those universes with planets like this are happening simultaneously. There are many worlds in which the same histories occur over and over, in which these islands’ Indians are savaged over and over, and the world ends up the same. Your Governor is a massacre-maker in over twenty-seven histories. But know this, too: I have never found your name, Smith Hawkins, in any history but this one. You must be special. “Special? Wait just a moment, King John—Sir. I don’t understand. Histories? How can I be special? I am…as far as I can tell, I am the precise opposite of ‘special.’” The mere fact that you exist means you are special. And to truly be special, you must do the special. If I am correct, this world you live in will become more terrible than all others unless you listen to me. You must do something for me, my humble, special servant. Hawkins blinked and stared. “Do something, King—erm—Sir?” You must kill those I tell you to, for it is their actions that will lead, over time, to destruction. You must begin by killing Sir William Stapleton and his family. “Kill them!” Have faith in my words, boy. I am from another world. “But why should I do something like that?” Know this: life and death do not mean the same thing when there are many versions of a person. Life and death mean more. There are many Sir William Stapletons, I said, but only this one is truly a deadly one. I will protect you if you decide to kill him. If you help me with this, I will also grant you entrance into my world, along with the others who have been helping me over

87 time. It is a grand universe, and you will be one of a great order, a great brother- and sisterhood that has helped me in the shadows along the ages. “A brotherhood,” he repeated. A great one. I know it must pain you to contemplate such deeds. But they are deeds in the best of faith. The heart is our room of mirrors, our undersea vents, our audienceless cinema screens—ah, ignore the last two, until you arrive in my world! But yes—the heart contains ourselves, like a homunculus, and the heart is not in the heart. We must not be blinded by the heart. We must take the present and bend it into the future it must become. “But you want me to kill, King—Sir John. A killer is not who—I cannot do this. If you could just tell me why….” It is not for us to know why we must do some things, Smith Hawkins. He swallowed. “I don’t know. You said you know what will happen. Why can’t you just tell me what will happen if I do not do what you ask?” The room blurred for a moment, and Hawkins had to hold his head. He felt lightheaded. Then he saw the mirror’s words again. The reflection was frowning. You are more of a killer, it said, if you do not do this now. Perhaps I had too much faith in one of the Hawkinses being just. “No, I…” Do what I ask, boy, and I will take you with me. If you do not, bad things will occur. Someone chuckled outside, banged on the door, and then thrust it open. A soldier. “What—you—” He stared at Hawkins, then leered, drunken face crinkling. “Just you wait ’til the Guvnah hears all ’bout this, lil’ thief boy.” He turned on his heel. “No, wait, wait! Please!” But the man was already starting down the hall. Before Hawkins knew what he was doing, he pulled out his pistol and fired twice. The first shot went into the wood, but the soldier froze, and the second went into his sternum. He groaned and fell to his knees, then onto one hand. Hawkins fired again, his last round, and this one was a shot through the brain. Silence. Hawkins stared. He ran over to the body, then dropped the gun as he turned the soldier over and saw the head wound clearer. There were steps from somewhere not far; and then, to his shock, the monkey appeared from the ceiling, landing near the body and grimacing. It glanced up at Hawkins, amber eyes widening, its fingers in its chattering mouth. It looked at the pistol.

88 “What’s going on here?” Hawkins whirled. A soldier was behind him. His eyes flared as he looked from the body to the monkey to Hawkins. “Who did this?” he asked. “Did you see anyone?” Hawkins stared. “I don’t know the person for sure….I need to examine the body. I just found it here.” The soldier had crouched down over the body. The monkey hopped back, hands over its head. It had picked up the pistol, and it dropped it as it hopped back. He glanced from the body to the monkey, then swore. “The…the monkey?” Hawkins stared, then chuckled. “Strange things, strange things…wait right there over the body. I need to go get my things.” He ran outside again, head spinning. The sound again: Brrrzzp. When he looked up, he realized it was warm and loud again, and the clouds were covering the sky. It was as if he’d walked back out of another world. He felt lightheaded again and fell to one knee. A man passed him. Hawkins felt a chill run through him. He whirled around. A soldier going into the ship. He ran to him and grabbed his shoulder. The man turned with a frown. “What d’ye want,” he said. Hawkins turned pale. It was the man he had just killed. Or hadn’t he? He stared for a second, and then he swooned, and the world he knew vanished again. 4 The next morning was a searing orange Monday, the kind of day that turned heat into whorls. Hawkins woke up in the surgeon’s ward on the ship. How had he gotten there? And then it flooded back: the soldier who had died and then not been dead, the mirror of Prester John….He got to his feet, then leaned back on the bed, vision purple with dehydration. He had to find out whether a not a man had been shot last night. Then he remembered Anne. The memory put him back on the bed, blinking at the wood. The surgeon’s mate came in as Hawkins sat back up, drumming on his thighs. The mate was a young man with long blonde curls and the eyes of a calf. He blinked every few moments. “Victor,” Hawkins said. “Victor, tell me: did someone get shot last night?” “Shot? Adslidikins, Sir! No, not that I know of. Why do you inquire?” “No soldier got shot? The monkey the Governor owns…nothing?”

89 “What, Sir? The monkey was shot, you said?” “Never mind,” Hawkins said, smiling faintly. “Are you feeling quite all right, Sir? You took quite a faint there last night, you did, Sir.” “Yes, yes. Just give me the drink you brought there, now.” It was only later that morning Hawkins’ swirling brain slowed enough for him to realize he might have made Lady Stapleton pregnant. He was even more astonished at himself than before. Briefly, he decided to renounce his work as a physician and let himself be captured by the cannibals in Dominica, or, better, the death-bringers of the sea. But he forced himself up and back to his duties. As the ship dragged through the fog of heat, Stapleton remained in his room. Twice, he called Hawkins in to bring him his afternoon glass of gin, which he sipped with a frown while Lady Stapleton lay on her bed and he read over his letters. The first time, he’d asked if Hawkins was doing all right. It was becoming apparent that Stapleton trusted few people beyond Hawkins and his wife. His mounting paranoia was becoming somewhat ironic, as his victorious indulgences left him vulnerable, and Hawkins had wondered before if the man simply wanted to die in one of his intoxicated states. But it made no sense to him. The Governor had had no authority to go on his Carib-deracinating journey with Philip Warner, and, though he received it for his trip to St. Vincent and now to Dominica, he was drawn by the same Crusader’s lust for heathen blood. “The pleasure of Indian hunting,” he’d said, “is seeing their black mouths open in pain.” He was like a child. Who would have recognized the man who owned the four great plantations; who had fought sixteen years ago, then Colonel Stapleton, in Nevis; the man who had become the powerful Governor General his predecessor, Sir Charles Wheeler, had not been able to be? But something was up, and he was keeping to himself. Hawkins, of course, thought he knew. He was in throes because he didn’t even know if Anne knew. She had frowned at him softly and looked away the first time he brought the gin, and she had had Stapleton’s head in her arms when he walked in, all of which had made Hawkins contemplate flinging himself to the sharks. The next time he went to Stapleton’s cabin, she had smiled and asked him his opinion on the children’s health. Before he went mad, however, she took him outside, held his wrist, and drew his ear to her lips. “When it is safe,” she whispered, lips brushing his earlobe, “we will try something again.” She smiled as she drew back. “I was waiting, you know. I feel something good inside

90 you. My little adventurer.” She gave him a quick kiss and left. He’d held her wrist as she went, but she shook her head, and he let her go, his neck cool, shoulders juddering, cheeks cherry- blossoming. It was what he’d needed to hear, as the Governor had told him the second time he brought the gin that he would not be able to give him the land after all. “I do not honestly think you ready,” he’d said, “to take care of something like that. I think you would do better to go to London.” By this point, Hawkins had forgotten he had even given Stapleton the letter, which he had worked on for nearly two days. It occurred to him that he’d been slowly planning his life as though he were going to move to an island and start a new life. The Governor, after all, had given his brother, Redmond, two plantations in Antigua four years ago. The decision made sense, Hawkins knew; he had long seen that what was inside him was not what had been inside his grandfathers. He’d left Stapleton’s room without a word, when Anne had followed him outside. Six men were badly wounded, and Hawkins and the surgeon had to turn them on their faces and burn brimstone to fumigate the decks. He inhaled the infernal fragrance with a Luciferian grin and hopped around the room, and you, distant reader, might well have thought him Mario leaping to save Peach. Now, he knew without a doubt that he could do away with the Governor. By the time night fell, Stapleton was once more complaining of headaches, and Hawkins said he would mix a tincture with gin and tonic. Hawkins laced the infusion with the best approximation of Veninum Lupinum, Battista Porta’s greatest poison, he could do: powdered glass, honey, arsenic, quicklime, and monkshood, ground together. It was supposed to be a pill but he simply mixed it into the tincture, and the result was a strange bubbling concoction that could have killed a plantation. And no one would suspect him. It was all he could do to hold himself back from telling Anne what he had done, from holding her wrist and seeing her reevaluate him from foot to head, eyes ashimmer as the maria of the moon…. But she had left when he came with the tincture. “Interesting effect on the tongue,” Stapleton said as he sipped it, smacking his lips. He chortled. “Hmm. By cock, boy! I should get headaches more often, if it means you’ll mix this more often, my lad.” “Best not to,” Hawkins said. “It’s hardly the drink of mortals.” *

91 Two days later, they had landed in Dominica. Hawkins’ chest, never accustomed to the sea, had been filling with brambles, partly because he had seen the gleam in Stapleton’s eyes. Like all journeys to Dominica, there was the added reason of hidden treasure; captives recaptured from the Caribs claimed the Indians had looted wrecked ships and hidden gold across the island. The treasure gleam had only grown stronger over time. After drinking the lethiferous beverage, Stapleton had first become sober and pensive, walking the decks of the ship with his hands behind his back. He had then begun to lecture the monkey in his cabin, outlining plans of destroying the Indians, and then he’d had extraordinary sex with his wife, a delirious series of cries and laughs and sighs and growls that left Hawkins in a silent shivering fury as he stood with his ear pressed to their door. Later, Stapleton had become manic and refused to sleep, shouting orders to the men to get to Dominica faster and laughing at the heavens with his arms outstretched. They had brought along a rickety harpsichord designed by the great Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco and the Governor General ordered it put at the end of the gangplank like a pirate’s condemned prisoner, from where he laughed and began to play William Byrd to the stars, the plank creaking under their weight, and ohmyLaplace’sGod, you would have thought him the preincarnation of Liszt or some death metal drummer. Hawkins was astonished at the beauty of his playing, as well as at the fear and rage and even tears in the crewmen’s eyes at the danger the Governor had put himself in, and the physician found his own eyes wet and nose snuffly, hands clenched tight over his thighs, until he remembered the sounds Anne had made the night before while he listened at the door. “By the dreams of the rood,” Hawkins muttered to himself. “He must be the devil incarnate.” He chuckled, then swallowed and stared as the Governor played while Anne and the crewmen yelled for him to return to the ship. When they had finally got him back on the deck, Hawkins slipped into the storeroom, making sure no one was around this time, and he reopened the chest. He put the gold back in. But the mirror was nowhere to be found. He looked through the chest, going almost to the bottom but for fear of being caught again—although, if what the mirror said was true, what was a life in a world of many copies?—but there was nothing. It was then his sweating and trembling returned in full force, and he began drumming then squeezing his thighs. Someone had taken it—unless it had never been there? But that was impossible. He couldn’t know.

92 He left the room in a rush, almost forgetting to close back the chest. Every glance, every lack of glance, seemed knowing, suspicious. A great brotherhood…no, impossible. He had to make sure Stapleton died. If there was no mirror, he could kill him and leave Anne. If Stapleton had it—if he has it, Hawkins thought as he paced the lamplit halls, if he has it, I have to kill him and bury it in the ocean. But what if there were many mirrors? How had the first one come to him? Had he found it, it found him, or neither? When he gave the Governor and Anne their morning glasses of mauby, having taken more of his laudanum, he looked around the room. There was nothing in sight. But that proved nothing, and he couldn’t ask directly. He silently, then loudly cursed himself for speaking back to that unreflecting glass at all. Just having been told he could—should—kill Stapleton….He understood, then, why the great Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake eighty-three years ago for the book he wrote in England ninety-nine years ago, and, at the same time, why he should never have been burnt, but instead the terrible books he attacked. 5 By the time they got to Dominica, it was afternoon and Stapleton was more energetic than ever. A faint white mist, like steam, had begun to hiss from his ears, and he was speckled with sweat. His great tongue flapped over his lips as he called to anchor the ship. They were at a small patch of beach littered with great pockmarked stones like some desert out of Dali. The first to go ashore was Stapleton, who seemed, in the time they took to dock, to have lost some of his energy. He walked slowly down the gangplank, rubbing his chest. Hawkins went after him. He had taken his flintlock pistol with him. On the ship, he’d thought he would shoot Stapleton in the jungle, where he could make it look like a Carib had killed him, but the idea of waiting, and even the idea of a Carib actually killing Stapleton instead of him, left him with a terrible pounding in his head and chest like the break of waves. He had to do it now, in front the world. When they were both on the beach, Hawkins darted in front Stapleton, who was walking slowly now, a hand over his heart and another over his mouth. His belladonna eyes were on the ground, but he stopped and glanced at his physician. He gave a small smile and opened his mouth. Hawkins took out his pistol, swallowed, and then shot Stapleton in the chest.

93 To his horror, the Governor simply stared at the hole, which had begun to hiss. Hawkins fired again three twice, one in Stapleton’s right shoulder and one where his heart should have been. A blue bubble formed from the heart wound, and when it popped, Hawkins smelled the arctic. Ice-blue liquid began oozing out of the wounds. Hawkins yelled and fired again, but this time there was no bullet left and there was just a spark and a bang. Suddenly, he realized Anne was screaming. It was as if the sound had been turned off within a large radius, then turned back on. The sound chilled him more than the blood, and when he turned to her and saw the gorgon flailing of her arms, how wide her mouth was open in her shrieks, he dropped the pistol. Stapleton took a step toward Hawkins, grimacing, blood gushing now out of the wounds. It curled around his legs like veins, and, as it touched the shore, it seemed to crystallize. His body was hissing. It seemed to be deflating, shrinking before the physician’s eyes. He grimaced more and more with each step, his eyes incomprehensible, his lips curved in that strange way that can as easily be from rage as sadness. And then he turned to his ship, as if he had just heard his wife, too; and then the Governor General of the Leeward Islands fell facedown with a squelch, a sea of hissing blue fluid cracking over the sand like ice-nine. There was a calmness punctuated by the whispers of the sea and the crack of the glacier fluid, and then the Governor’s body gave a jerk and flipped itself onto its back. Something was writhing inside him. As the world stared, a great cephalopod tore from his chest, pulsing red and blue. It looked around, eyes wide and dark with silent fury, and then it scuttled into the ocean, falling and writhing every few steps. Its brief presence had filled the air with the smell of old sugarcane. There was silence, except for the hysterical laughter of the monkey; and then one of the soldiers shot Hawkins in the arm. Hawkins gasped, clutching his elbow and staring at the soldiers, and then took off for the trees. He probably would not have made it had it not been for the sudden spurt in bubbles near the ship, which created a choral gasp worthy of Palestrina. Then there was calm once more. “Who was that?” one soldier said slowly. “The…the one who was by the Governor’s side, I believe, right?” “I think the physician—yes, that was it,” another said. “Zounds, the Governor…what?”

94 Anne was in tears. Her eyes were red and her hair was frizzed over her forehead from tugging at it while she shrieked. She was pale as a vampire. “What—what—what—” She began to shudder, and a soldier had to catch her before she fell to the floor. “Look!” Stapleton’s body had begun to tremble again, and everyone who was not reciting prayers or scanning the trees for Carib sorcerers braced themselves. But there was nothing more in him, and his body simply began crumbling away, like blue-stained sand. Soon, it was indistinguishable from the glittering ice that had crystallized over the shore, as though the shore were really some part of the north, or the moon, even. No Caribs showed themselves, and no one but a few crazy soldiers who wanted Hawkins shot and quartered wanted to go on shore anymore, so the ship sailed away, leaving the physician in the jungle, and nothing was heard again of Smith Hawkins, not in this history or any others. Prester John, on the other hand…. Afterword I am reminded here, where the manuscript cuts off, of the pioneering research of Lilliputtanesca, who has gone so far into her own mind for her experiments that she is unfortunately no longer available for comments, questions, or anything, really, beyond blank stares. L, as she often asked to be called, was a psychonaut. She did not, however, believe that drugs cause the mind to simply deceive itself by alteration into sensing things that it would not have sensed without those drugs (this model seems to suggest a static notion of reality, she argued). She also did not believe that the sensations produced were entirely real. What L proposed was that under rare circumstances, a user may encounter sensations that do not correspond to the drug’s effects, and that these sensations are, in fact, coherent, recognizable forms that exist nowhere else. She did not go so far as to call them “entities”; but it is clear from her writing and videos that she believed they were just that. She further claimed that destiny was real, but only in the sense that these “entities” have spoken words that were already in our mind and told us what we must do. “We are imprisoned in ourselves,” she writes (my translation). Her work, it has been proposed by a critic from Thulcandriandra, is a sort of refinement of some of the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who I have not had the time to read. L, who I must also here confess to not having fully read, though she is herself extraordinarily well-read (I am young, you must understand), also said that what we call the heart is a state of mind, and the physical heart

95 may be, under the influence of destiny, modified, so that there is a “spilling-over” of realities. In this state, she continues, there is no time, a concept she links to a “misreading” of the Jillionts, an intelligent creature that she claims has been misidentified by a Thulcandriandran writer as “Trafalmadorians.” I should also add here that any inter-world historian is subject to difficulties no historian unaware of other worlds is; we have to take stock of many histories of many worlds, some almost exactly the same but for seemingly inconsequential details, which is why most of us are required to possess the ability of living a large number of years, multiple lifetimes for most, and how dreary it can be, let me tell you, this life lived less in the present than in trying to make various pasts seem as real as the present….Nonetheless, I will also add that, though I was reminded of L’s research, there is no reason to believe this tale of Hawkins, which has been reconstituted through various ages, inks, and locales, contains anything of the sort. The figure known as Prester John has been reported in other histories (destiny we create from where we dream, and all knowledge from the past, which, L said, is “but a step above the dreaming place”). But even if Prester John had not appeared elsewhere, he must be supposed to exist here, just as our destiny does, unless, of course, reality is more static (itself not a static label) than L supposed. I must also note that Prester John is reported as appearing to a number of other figures in this world, but it is only in Smith Hawkins’ case that we have a legend in which the mythical king speaks of this underground order. This, coupled with the fact that Stapleton’s death only caused a brief increase in the shipment of missionaries to the English colonies and originated some fascinating precursor treatises to L’s work (as well as a famous couplet by this world’s Alexander Pope: In England we’ve got many Monsters left / Yet none compare to those in a West Indian’s chest and a horrific painting by Goya), suggests that his words to Hawkins, if there were words, must be interpreted very critically indeed. The final issue raised by the above text, of course, is what constitutes history in the textbooks of various worlds. I have compiled Smith Hawkins’ tale because he is absent from all histories I am aware of; nonetheless, he is mentioned in this text, Prester John is mentioned in many, and it seems he is a scarcely-known local legend in the universe this tale supposedly occurred in. Nonetheless, this will be the first historical account of his actions, dressed up a bit to get the kids reading, since it’s so hard for them, even with all this talk of instantaneous transfer of material, such that one can absorb a novel in ten minutes and a moderate library in half a day.

96 I do not seek to complicate notions of history. All I ask is that history be revealed, since we cannot really time-travel before we are born without losing all consciousness, and these texts are all we have. Long live the legend. It is already our destinies to be legendary, like Mr. Hawkins. This does, though, raise one other point, which I had forgotten to mention earlier. As a historian, I can only be honest. L’s conclusion, as I gather from Miles P. Sonic’s commentary, is that the “entities” she described constitute, at their most extreme, the entire world. The world is the mind, and the entities, once fully realized, are what we perceive as rocks and feces and humans and sea monsters. This is not solipsism, however. L claimed that if we got close enough to the things in our mind, wherever they came from, we would find no way back out, and the “world of our mind would become the new world we see, likely in a seamless transition. Perhaps many of us have transitioned into our mind-worlds without even being aware of it, which makes the historian’s job theoretically impossible, assuming the invalidity of these mind-worlds; but that can only be assumed by assuming that historical personages did not themselves become slaves to the things in their minds.” If this is so, the wife of the Thulcandriandran Bishop of Worcester’s response to Charles Darwin’s claims that humans and other primates descend from a common ancestor is illustrative: “Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.” Interestingly, the same woman, in the parallel world of Speculum or Earth-9, is recorded as having remarked the exact opposite: “If this is the case, that we are descended from the lowest of the apes, we must let all the lands, all the races, all the worlds we may encounter, know! There is no easier confirmation that the word of Christ applies less to the slaves and that the doctrine of the Garden and our common parents is literal truth. Yes, dear, we should let all the worlds there be know this man’s conclusion.”

97 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jonathan Bellot was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1987 to Dominican parents. Just before his ninth birthday, he moved with his parents back to the Commonwealth of Dominica. He received his B. A. from Saint Leo University. In 2010 and 2011, he served as a member of the organizing committee for the Nature Island Literary Festival, a literary festival in Dominica that has featured such writers and artists as Derek Walcott, Colin Channer, Kei Miller, and many others. In August of 2010, he was a featured reader at the festival in a special session alongside Alick Lazare and Esther Phillips, editor of BIM: Arts for the 21st Century. He conducted short-story workshops in Dominica in the summer of 2010 and 2011 as part of the Literary Festival. He is a 2012 – 2013 recipient of a Legacy Fellowship from Florida State University. At this time, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Humanism, Transnational Literature, Belletrist Coterie, BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, and Black Lantern Publishing. Aside from reading and writing, his interests include astronomy, the deep sea, art and music history, anime, the nineteenth century in general, Calvin and Hobbes, and videogames.

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