The Keyhole Opera Read online

  DIED AT SMUGGLER, COL.

  JULY 3, 1901

  AGED 27 YEARS

  “In the world’s broad field of battle

  In the bivouac of life,

  Be not like dumb driven cattle

  Be a hero in the strife.”

  Poor bastard, he thought, to die in a mine and then be buried under bad verse. He laughed, enjoying the sound of his own laughter.

  By the time he had returned to town, his legs were sore and the sun was going down. He retrieved the Rilke book, then stopped at the Village Market to buy something simple, something a minor poet might eat. Beans. Crackers.

  While the beans warmed on the electric stove, he searched the cupboard. There was a set of stylish, mass produced stoneware, but he found what he was looking for in a hand-made bowl with a chipped rim. He held it, feeling in his hands the shape of the hands that had made it.

  Eating, he thought about the black damp of the mines. He thought of timbers splintering under the mountain’s weight. Bottomless holes that had a bottom after all. Cave-ins. Dust.

  He was too old to die young. Far too old. And he didn’t think he was going to get in his ten good lines, either. He had always been better at recognizing genius than expressing it.

  He washed the dishes in hot water and rinsed them in cold, feeling the difference on his hands. He undressed in one of the bedrooms and then went to stand naked before the bathroom mirror. His body was nothing like the torso of Apollo in Rilke’s poem. His pale skin sagged. Veins stood out blue in his wrists and ankles. Looking at this body, another man would have despaired. The man he was yesterday, for example.

  II. Metamorphoses

  Spotted Dolphin

  FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of childhood, the boy dreamed of buoyancy, of floating through water supported by water, of floating through the air supported by the air, of floating through space supported by space. He shared his dreams with his sister. She was a year older, but willing to follow him. Feathers in their hands, they jumped from the roof together, learning how to fly.

  “You’ll get hurt,” said their older brother.

  They weren’t hurt, but they didn’t fly, either.

  The boy dreamed of galaxies and jellyfish. He liked to lie on his back in the night grass and listen for the music of the stars. Sometimes his sister lay on her back beside him. They never heard anything but the sounds of earthly night: crickets, wind in the trees, the clatter of kitchen sounds inside the houses. Still, he said he was sure of the music. Someday he would hear it.

  When the older brother grew up, he let life take him up. He married, fathered children, and worked hard.

  When the sister grew up, she let life take her up. She married, bore children, and was a mother to them.

  When the boy grew up, well, there was some doubt that he ever grew up at all. He went to school for a while. He worked for a while. He had lovers for a while. He was a man now, but he did not become a husband or a father. Mostly, he traveled the world. He told his sister that he still had those dreams of buoyancy, still dreamed of galaxies and jellyfish that were both aglow with the same jeweled light.

  He lived for a time in Nepal, in Mexico, in Italy. He had friends in San Francisco and Key West, in Boulder and Madison.

  “Why doesn’t he make something of himself?” growled the older brother.

  “He is,” said the sister.

  “What?” said the brother. “What is he making of himself?”

  But the sister had no words for it.

  The man who dreamed of buoyancy learned to meditate. He ate mushrooms that taught him how to cast his soul out of his body like a fishing lure on a silver line. He visited his sister and her family. He made his nephews and nieces laugh with his stories of their mother up on grandma’s roof, feathers in her hands, almost flying.

  “Don’t tell them that!” the sister said.

  “You don’t want your own children to learn how to fly?”

  The man visited his older brother’s family, too. The older brother called the sister afterwards. “What’s he going to do in his old age? Does he think we’ll support him?”

  “You would refuse?” said the sister.

  “That’s not the point.”

  The man traveled. He lived for a time in Thailand, Australia, Ecuador, and Spain. He stayed with friends in New Orleans, in Taos, and in Boston. He wrote postcards to his sister. He ate pills that taught him how to see farther than the strongest telescopes. He put drops on his tongue that let him hear the songs of dolphins in the ocean deep.

  He called her late at night from a city not far from where she lived. He said, “You used to lie in the grass with me, listening to the night sky.”

  She said, “I remember.”

  He said, “Help me. I need your help.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I can’t drive a car with my hands like this.”

  She came to the place he named. The skin of his hands was gray and spotted. His fingers had grown together. He said, “We have to hurry.”

  She drove him many miles that night, toward the lowering moon, all the way to the sea. He would not answer her questions, but only recounted their childhood together, the way she had taken up his dreams as if they were her own.

  His legs seemed to be joined at the knees. She helped him out of the car and he leaned heavily against her as they crossed the wide beach. Near the water’s edge, he fell forward and inched his way along. The dorsal fin ripped his shirt as it grew. His sister felt his desperation for the water, and she pulled him forward by one flipper. Breath puffed out of his blowhole. The sand must be rough against his belly, his sister thought, but then he was far enough for a wave to lift him, and he was free.

  Free, his sister thought, looking out over the waves.

  His new life had come so suddenly, she had not even said goodbye.

  She saw the arch of his fin in the moonlight. She could see his body undulate. He splashed once with his tail and was gone.

  His sister stood still for a long time, then mimicked the way he had moved. A wave went from her shoulders, down her spine.

  She couldn’t follow him. Even so, she stayed there, watching the moon set over the waves, practicing.

  The sister called the older brother. She said, “He’s gone.”

  The older brother cried, and he said, “Well, what could we expect after the sort of life he lived?” Later, he told his children that their uncle had died. Much, much later, when the children were almost grown, he cautioned them to choose carefully the lives they would live.

  The sister told her children that their uncle had become a dolphin. Much, much later, when the children were almost grown, she told them that by now their uncle might be a celestial body. She led them outside on a summer night. She lay on her back in the damp grass, and her children lay beside her. Together, they listened to the stars.

  Rich and Beautiful

  IN LOS ANGELES, A MAN AND A WOMAN MET.

  He said, “How do you like me?”

  She said, “You are rich and accomplished.” She thought he could be richer and more accomplished if he just worked a little harder, but she didn’t say so at first. Then she said, “And how do you like me?”

  “You are young and beautiful,” he told her. He thought that she could be made even more beautiful with a little surgery, but he kept this to himself.

  They married.

  “I would love you all the more,” she admitted, “if we had not a penthouse, but a mansion.”

  “And I would love you more than I already do,” he confessed, “if your cheekbones were a little higher.”

  So he worked harder as a deal maker, and she went under the knife. They sold the expensive penthouse and bought a far more expensive mansion. With her new cheekbones, she began a career as a model.

  “I’m a lucky man,” he said. “Although I’d consider myself luckier if your legs were a bit longer.”

  “I pretty much comp
letely adore you,” she said. “If only we were together in not just a mansion, but an estate with vineyards.”

  He worked harder than ever, making the deals he had always made and also promoting her as a model. Again, she submitted herself to the surgeons.

  With her longer legs she was among the most beautiful women in the world, and her husband and promoter was among the richest men in California. They lived on a wine estate overlooking the sea.

  She could imagine him richer. He could imagine her still more beautiful. Each admitted as much.

  The surgeons made her lips a little more full, her breasts more round, her waist more narrow. The modeling contracts he negotiated for her brought in higher and higher fees. She was in great demand.

  Before long, his most lucrative deals revolved around her beauty. She spent more and more time in surgery, making adjustments. Weeks after each operation, when the swelling had gone down and her scars were undetectable, she would appear in veils to be unwrapped like a treasure for the press. Each time, the world was eager to see how nearly perfect she had become.

  For a few days, those who had paid a fortune for the right could pose her and snap her picture. Then, before anyone had much more than glimpsed her, her husband and the surgeons would discuss what was to come next—some alteration of her finger bones, an adjustment to her brow or the width of her mouth.

  Now he is richer than Croesus. She is more gorgeous than Aphrodite. Images of her face and hair sell makeup and shampoo. The silhouette of her legs sells cars. A photo of her hand holding a drink sells vacations.

  She’s invisible much of the time, bandaged or in seclusion. Not even her husband sees her. She is available for only a few sessions a year. Her fees are sky high. Every few months, she emerges for a new unveiling.

  He’s on the phone day and night, making deals, making plans. His wife is the most appealing woman in the world. Keeping her that way is making him richer and richer.

  He hardly sleeps. New opportunities are always appearing.

  She hardly exists. Perfection is always a work in progress.

  Red-Winged Blackbirds

  TO THE THIRD FLOOR OF A glass tower among many glass towers, the men and women came every day to look at gray numbers on the computer screens. They came five days a week, fifty weeks or more a year, to study the numbers and decide whether to buy or sell.

  The third floor was close enough to the street that a few trees grew almost to the height of the windows. A man looking out might be hypnotized by the shimmer of sun on dark summer leaves. A woman looking out might feel melancholy for the bare winter branches. But the men and women who worked on the third floor had been chosen for their powers of concentration. Summer or winter, they did not look out of the windows.

  It was the custom on the third floor for the men to wear black suits and the women to wear brown dresses. Colors distracted. By design, nothing on the third floor tempted the concentration of the men and women sitting before their screens.

  Seasons came and went, as they always do. And always, the men dressed in black and the women dressed in brown attended their work. One winter was particularly long and cold and dark. For weeks on end, the sun did not shine. Rain fell from black clouds and encased the world in ice. The men and women on the third floor worked every day as if they never noticed that the world outside their window was a shadowed tomb.

  When at last spring came, the men and women on the third floor paid attention only to their gray numbers even as the first buds outside their windows broke open like green firecrackers. Even as yellow light streamed down from a blue sky, they minded their business. They did not look out through the windows.

  Ah, but the heart has eyes of its own. Their hearts saw the yellow light, the green sparks on the trees. Their hearts felt the warmth of spring and stirred inside their chests with the stirring of the spring breeze. But the men and women of the third floor would not be moved. They all kept their attention on their numbers, even though they all felt their hearts strain and beat with feathered wings against the cages of their chests.

  A moment before they died, did they know it? Did they touch their hands to their breasts? But if they did, it was too late. Already, their hearts were breaking out, prying open the ribs that caged them. Already, their hearts were bursting into the stale air of the third floor.

  Now the men’s black feathered hearts filled the air with the flurry of their liberated wings. The brown feathered hearts of the women flew among them.

  They were not free. Not yet. They had traded a prison of flesh for a prison of glass. They dashed themselves against the windows, but the glass held.

  Was one bird perhaps still more human heart than bird? Was one bird perhaps more passion than feather and bone? For no bird could ever have broken through that window glass. But finally, one did. One bird, or one still-human heart shaped like a bird, hurtled through the pane and fell dead on the other side.

  Black birds followed. As each one passed through the broken glass, his shoulders were stained with the blood of the one that had died. Soon the trees outside the window were crowded with birds who sang excitedly for the taste of air and the colors of day. They sang, too, for the hearts of the women to join them.

  But the brown birds held back. They circled inside the windows of the third floor, grieving for the lives they had not lived as women.

  The black birds in the trees kept calling. By the time the first brown-feathered heart was ready to fly through the broken window, the blood had dried on the glass and did not mark her wings. She flew to a branch. One by one, the others followed her.

  Now the red-winged blackbirds arrive with the first breath of spring. The males are first and must sing day after day to coax the females to forget the lives they once knew. “Come,” sing the hearts of the men. “Come and live in the spring that is now unfolding. The sky is blue. The world burns with green fire. Come!”

  Alephestra

  THE GODS USED TO DECORATE the night sky with mortals they would honor or punish, save or condemn. Cassiopeia sits upon a heavenly throne, immortalized for her beauty. Yet for her vanity, the sky revolves and turns her on her head. Castor and Pollux must dwell at times in the underworld, but Jupiter so admired their brotherly love that on some nights they look down from the sky where all is perfection. The young hunter, Arcas, circles the pole star and is forever about to slay the bear that he thinks is charging him. He did not know, and will never know, that the beast rushes not to attack, but to embrace him. She is his mother, Callisto, altered by a jealous curse. To prevent the shame and horror of Callisto’s murder, Jupiter hurled son and mother into the heavens where the fatal thrust will never come, but where we must see poor Arcas every night and be reminded of the thing he is always about to do.

  So it is with other constellations, stars, and heavenly lights. Mortals beyond counting or remembering have gone from this sphere to that higher one.

  One time, though, the transformation was in the other direction. Long ago, the world had not the one moon we see now, but two. The second, smaller moon was called Alephestra, though some say that she wasn’t truly the second moon, but the first. She was a goddess, but one of modest station and powers, or else she was a titan, or some being even more ancient. She never visited the earth. Instead she looked upon the blue world from the distance and praised it. The clouds were beautiful to her. Oceans gleamed in the sun. Although she had seen neither leaf nor grove, she would praise trees for their beauty. Although she had never seen mortal man or woman, she loved the stories that gods told about them.

  For a long time, the little moon’s talk amused Jupiter. He would ask her to describe the deer, the flowers, and the new-plowed fields of earth. She told him about the rainbow colors of fish scales even though she had never seen rainbows or fish, and he smiled with what may have been indulgence. When she compared the smell of a wet bear to the odor of a man wearing a woolen cloak and told Jove that a bear on its hind legs in the rain was very hard to tell apart from
a man, he nodded and smiled a different sort of smile. When she said that flower nectar was like the nectar of Olympus, he laughed. Alephestra knew that his pleasure was sometimes at her expense, but she had no way to know which of her impressions were correct and which were mistaken. Besides, whatever details she might have misunderstood, she remained certain that the earth was more wondrous than the heavens. And one way or another, her descriptions and pronouncements always pleased Jupiter.

  One day, however, the old lightning hurler was in a bad mood. Some mortal maiden had refused his advances, and he sat among the stars, glowering at earth. When Alephestra glided near, she saw the way his face was twisted. Jupiter in a bad mood was dangerous, and anyone who could would have avoided him. But Alephestra’s orbit was fixed. She could neither alter her path nor hurry past him. Instead of drifting by in silence, she tried to please him. She began to sing about the sacred groves and the honor that mortals paid to trees.

  Jupiter commanded her to be silent. The world of mortals was nothing like what she imagined. Mortals might esteem a sacred grove here or there, but they despoiled whole forests to make pasture for their sheep or for firewood. Whatever beauty there was on the earth was fleeting. Grasp mortal loveliness as you might here or there, it would elude you somewhere else. And all that was beautiful on earth fell at last to rot and ruin. The world below was not worthy of song.

  Perhaps Alephestra could not hear him as she sang. She kept singing.

  Jupiter is not a god of second chances. Annoyed, he sent Alephestra hurtling toward the earth. As she fell, she took the shape of a woman. If she could not stop singing the praises of the imperfect world, let her see it for herself.

  Like a fallen star, the moon struck the sea with a thunderclap and the hiss of steam. All around her was blackness as she settled to the bottom of the abyss. Truly, earth was not as she had been told, and still less than she had imagined. There was nothing at all to see.

  Even so, the taste of salt was novel to her, and the cold embrace of water against her skin was nothing like celestial ether. Disappointed though she was, she was fascinated, too. On the bottom of the sea, she discovered the sensation of walking. In time, she wandered high enough to encounter light, and finally air. She walked ashore in a place where mountains met the sea. For the first time, Alephestra saw trees. She heard the waves breaking at her feet and the cries of gulls. She stood amazed. Apollo’s chariot slowly crossed the sky, and the shifting shadows amazed Alephestra. The colors of the sunset made her sigh. Stars burned forth. Tides rose and fell around her, and she did not move from where she stood.