Myths of Origin Read online

  The Bitter Herb Grows Tall

  I must confess that there is another dream. It is the dream of the silent girl. It is very small, and the I-that-is-Ayako is ashamed. It is not nearly so grand as the others.

  In the dream I am wearing gray—very soft, cat-like. I am washed in blue light. The dream-girl is alone, for all of the dream-us is alone. We come from Ayako—we cannot be other than she, and she is alone beyond dreams of solitude.

  Her dream-hair is drawn into a knot at her neck, but strands have escaped and blow darkly against her shoulders. This dream does not move. She does not change. The heart in her beats very slowly, and she wets her lips from time to time. After a pass of her delicate tongue, the lower lips shines silver. That is all.

  She peers out a window at a long expanse of trees, which whisper to each other in the night, passing along what rumors there are that concern trees. In front of her/me is well-made paper, stacked together neatly, as if we meant it to stay; all her pens lie motionless in their pots. She has rings on her knuckles, and she taps them against the paper, making a thickly muffled noise. But other than this she does not move, and the paper is blank.

  I do not know why she sits at the bottom of the Ayako-belly like a solemn stone. But she is there, and in their orbits, the dreams seem to turn towards her as they pass.

  Grasses Wither

  I found your clavicle, white as a wand. The grasses are beginning to turn brown at the tips now—not much, but a little, the gold before rot sets in. In the dream of the sister-wife, they seem to wave like tiny hands, the hands of children drowning. It called out to me among the reeds, plaintive and small.

  I dreamed that I wanted it, the long chalky expanse, lying in the red soil like a hyphen—the sentence of your body unfinished. I wanted to put my mouth to the ulcerated predicate, to complete you with my tongue and lips and teeth, to bite you off and continue the flesh of you down into my own. In my hand it looks alien, an infinitive from a foreign language covered in bone.

  I dream that I hate the owner of the bone. The dream-brother, ghost-husband. I collect him like marbles over half a desert, I crouch in the silt-ridden delta until I have sunk to my knees, grub his filthy bones and chunks of flesh from the earth, to pile them together in a grotesque cairn. When I found his intestines I had to loop them over my arms and around my neck, where they hung slimy and stinking, a mottled serpent-noose. They tried to drag me under.

  It is what I was made for. The dream-search and the spill of his organs like egg yolks on glass. I hate the smell of him now, the curdled scent of his veins turned inside-out. It is all over me, gesticulating in my pores, his foreign sweat.

  Yet I want the clavicle. It is smooth and clean of flesh. Dreaming within my dream I put it to my lips and play his collarbone like a macabre flute. My cedar-dusted fingers press into the marrow and low notes exude, sibilant and lurching down its barometric octave. Music throttles itself and serrates the wind.

  Wherever the sound touches, the grass separates into dust and falls to the starving earth like a handful of torn pages.

  I dream that he is death in death.

  Barley Ripens

  I-Ayako has become ill. I watch her retch by the River with disdain. Her body heaves like a blown sail when the wind changes. I hate that she is old, that her skin is no longer beautiful. Below, in the valley of the dream-village, shocks of green writhe like demoniac oceans—the barley comes of age and the I-Ayako adds our body’s sloughing to the earth.

  My hands are not mine. Fingernails half-grown, jutting out like moons buried in a black-soiled field. I am only this lurching body. I am only this. These.

  Yet, I begin to wonder about the body which hangs on me like torn clothes. If she dies, what will happen to us? Is there an I-above-all? An ideogram that is me and I and Ayako and all the dreams together—is there a divinity of first person? A prime mover of our limbs? We are afraid that she is failing us, that she will keep lurching into the water, vomiting and vomiting until she empties herself completely and we too have gone out of her by the throat-road. We are afraid the cramping body is the only real.

  If she dies, will we simply blow apart, pine needles in a swift wind? Do the dreams possess location? Are we locative, dative, ablative? Where is the language of Us? What linguistic calculation could be made which would result in our variable, our presence outside of the Ayako-equation? We are cross-multiplied, we are exponential. She is not.

  I am Ayako, and since she cannot answer, I cannot. When she/I drink our tea-less water, it falls into the flesh with worry edging its taste.

  But in the morning it had passed, and our belly was calm.

  Mantids Hatch Out

  I dreamed of a great maze. It turned underneath me, left and right and over itself, a great snarl of brick and mortar. It was painted and at each turn a color faded into its mate, so that the whole expanse curled like some impossibly complex sea serpent—perhaps if I had lingered I could have read some forbidden language in its knot-work. I could almost scry its subterranean tongues, reaching into the earth—down, down, down.

  It had a physiology, a throbbing anatomy of stone and pigment. I could mark the pathway of its blood, through arterial thoroughfares and bile ducts, descending organs, kidneys, tangled intestines. It was a body, whole and complete, but one which contained the bodies of others like stacked dolls—strange-skinned creatures with blank eyes, and in the shadows a great black bull tossing his horns. I dream it lies below me, its skin touching my skin, like a prone lover.

  I put my dream-lips, my flaming mouth to it. But I am a virgin, I have not done it before, so of course, the fire spreads too quickly. It blanches the twisting walls, blackens the creatures to skeletons, doors to molten piles of knob and hinge. I arch my back and my breasts brush the bull-horns and the great wooden gate—they shatter into pyres. My toes curl at its angular walls, my incandescent womb opens and shuts, clamping at its architecture, clutching wildly at the maze. I am a holocaust, breathing heavily and writhing over my adored labyrinth, twisting my legs around its girth. I am the inferno, clamping my body over the adulated—and who could find the blood of my virginity in the embers of this city?

  Everything is red now and I dream my own laughter is a scorch-mark, my thighs tightening on the maze-roads send them up like cheap matches. My belly lifts up and a rain of naphtha-sweat gleams on the already engorged flames—and I am laughing, laughing, laughing as I burn divinity into this place.

  What could I ever be but this black-eyed eater of cities?

  When I leave the dream maze, still full of my heat and sweat, I can smell the flesh of the bull cooking, smoky and sweet.

  And I search again, for another, for the beloved, for the bed-notch, for a city who will sing my love out in unmeasured lyrics.

  The Shrike Calls

  “What did you want to ask me that day?” the Moth mused in his thick voice, rubbing his forelegs together lazily. I sat with him in the shade of the second floor, escaping the early summer heat.

  “I was going to ask you for a lesson,” I answered. “Gate and River tutor me. More often when I was young, but still, from time to time.”

  “I am only a Moth, I know how to eat wool and seek light. If you want to know these things, I can teach you.”

  “No. I am not sure there are answers which would have meaning for me any longer. I am a bad student. I am too weak to be the wife of Alone.”

  The Moth shrugged. “Why do you not go up to the third level? Perhaps there is something there which would have meaning for you.”

  I-Ayako looked up through the slatted floorboards, the slant of unassuming light that filtered through to land, moth-like, on my open palm.

  “It is so far. I have only just come to this level.”

  “I do not wish to stay in your pagoda. I have heard rumor of a beautiful flame in the city, and I go tonight to meet my family there. So I cannot tutor you. I do not have the time. Ask the third floor.” And with that, the Moth spread his stately, c
ream-spattered wings and flitted out of the tower.

  It was a far more difficult climb than it had been to the second floor. The walls were smoother and bore less paint. I tore three fingernails in the ascent, and when I pulled myself, almost weeping, onto the next knotted floorboards, my hands bled freely.

  The angled room was bare except for a few forlorn grasshoppers and a small statue which stood in the far corner. Time had erased its face from the stone, but it stood, calm, seraphic. Gray featureless rock stared out at me and there were no sounds save the cries of prey-birds circling.

  The Butcherbird is Silent

  I dream that I can string the Questions and Answers together on a long line of catgut, like little wooden prayer beads, or a thread drawn through thick leather. I dream I can see them all around my shaggy neck, sparkling against my fur. I hold the heft of them in my paws, matched pairs like chromosomes, AB, CD, KL, XY.

  I hold a plethora of halves. Each time a man comes to gain entrance to the city, he completes a set and my collection grows. It is an art, and I am skilled at it. Perhaps at the end of time I will truly hold them together like a great necklace, a grand unified theory of interrogation. Each time their flesh touches my tongue with dark and secret flavors, I inch closer, my books tilt towards balance.

  A boy came wandering with heavy-lidded eyes, the droop of the lashes that can only mean extreme enlightenment—or opium addiction. His fingers were long and pale, funereal, with fingernails I imagined would taste of ripe dates. I began to quiver with anticipation and desire.

  The boy brushed hair of a watery shade from his forehead and looked languorously up and down my body.

  And yet it is stupid and simple. I ask him to calculate the relativistic mass of a single photon. He blinks stupidly, he is flustered, he cannot answer. The ritual has become almost mute—no arcane spray of ash over their bodies could cure them of their pride. They all think I am a beast, a monster with no mind, able only to spout my riddles by rote.

  I must explain to him, painstakingly—for I must supply the Answer if he cannot, it the least courtesy I can provide—how the mass of a particle is proportional to its total energy E, and involving the speed of light, c, in the proportionality constant: m = E/c2.

  His expression reminds me that occasionally there is beauty to be found in blankness.

  And yet, another pair of wooden beads is drawn together, the oil from each mingling, and the weight of my necklace increases. It is for the city planners to worry that the population does not swell, that traders avoid the walls, that no beautiful foreign brides are brought with almond eyes. I fulfill my duty, the coupled words are spoken, and I increase.

  This boy sat heavily in my belly, tasting of iodine and oatcakes. I am exhausted of this work, and yet it goes on. I am bombarded by photons with cruel masses, with high cheekbones and stiletto heels. Light sits heavily on my lap, an old whore as bored as her customer is disgusted. But it is the disgust that keeps it going. Disgust, at least, is tangible and real.

  If there is a monster there must be a man, or woman, to approach it. It is the way of things. Perhaps when I have brought together all the beads, it will cease to be the way of things. And then I will rest and let Thebes be damned.

  Deer Break Antlers

  I-within-Ayako could not breathe. I could not move. Tears rushed from my eyes like a spring from a rock wall, streaming down my cheeks, mixing with sweat and grime from the climb up onto the creaking floor of the third level. My throat was a boulder against a tomb, my limbs a sudden dark wax, flooding into each other, under and around the radiance of the stone figure. I could not think. My mind was empty of everything but it, even the dreams, even the dreams.

  Its face, luminous and round as all the suns I have ever known, stared out, beatific, sorrowing, without eyes or mouth. The sorrow penetrated me like a hand, holding my heart, holding all of me that can be moved by beauty, holding me like the mother that died, spilling over with forgiveness. Nothing I had ever done or been or imagined myself mattered, only this ancient stone whose name I could not begin to guess. What god had it been meant to show? I did not know, could not know, but for a slow blink of the sun’s eye, it erased every shadow I had dragged behind me like a tawdry merchant’s cart, its one broken hand gracefully bent into a mudra of seraphic gentleness.

  It made me a child in braids and a poor dress, crawling into my mother’s lap and pressing my face into her warm skin. I sobbed against her, my bones cracking open and my deepest blood pouring over her absolving hands. I died away from the dreams. I and the stone were the whole universe, for a moment that stretched out in all directions, an infinite plane of liquid jewels, she was all things, and the smooth gray of its faded eyelids filled my vision with a great burning. All of me was on fire, incandescent, my legs, my mouth, my tears searing as they coursed, rivers of naphtha scalding and cleansing. It was inside me, purging me of all that was not light. I was made of gold, singular, my skin kindled and blazed, I saw nothing at all before me but endless plains of its light and mine flooding together like tributary and river, river and sea.

  “Stone,” I wept, my face swollen with tears, “tell me a lesson about myself.”

  Stone considered for a moment, and began.

  Cicadas Begin to Sing

  The cicada lies in the earth for seventeen years. It is warm and dark there, it is soft and wet. Its little legs curl underneath it, and twitch only once in a little while. What does the cicada dream when it is folded into the soil? What visions travel through it, like snow flying fast? Its dreams are lightless and secret. It dreams of the leaves it will taste, it composes the concerto it will sing to its mate. It dreams of the shells it will leave behind, like self-portraits. All its dreams are drawn in amber. It dreams of all the children it will make.

  And then it emerges from the earth, shaking dust and damp soil from its skin. It knows nothing but its own passion to ascend—it climbs a high stalk of grass and begins to sing, its special concerto to draw the wing-pattern of its beloved near. And as it sings it leaves its amber skin behind, so that in the end, it has sung itself into a new body in which it will mate, and die.

  The cicadas leave their shells everywhere, like a child’s lost buttons. The shells do not understand the mating dance that now occurs in the mountains above it. The shell knows nothing of who it has been, it does not remember the dreaming self, that was warm in the earth. The song emptied it, and now it simply waits for the wind or the rain to carry it away.

  You are the cicada-in-the-earth. You are the shell-in-the-grass. You do not understand what you dream, only that you dream. And when you begin to sing, the song will separate you from your many skins.

  This is the lesson of the cicada’s dream.

  Bindweed Flourishes

  I dream that my wrists are bleeding. Mountain spat basalt and bound them. River discovered the village was missing and in his rage tore open the walls of my womb. It lies gaping and red, the marks of his fingers black and terrible. My womb is screaming and they call it music. River says that I am beautiful now. That he will cut more of me open to reveal such beauty. He is planning an expedition to sound the depth of my spinal fluid.

  I have had to release my storm clouds and let the oceans lighten. Mountain crushed me under his weight until I yielded. He ground into me grinning and panting. They have poured the foundation of their Palace directly into my throat—mortar and burning pitch, and no I have no voice but the mute growling of my deepest mouth.

  I dream that it never ends. There are so many hands inside me now, rummaging in my flesh as though it were an attic. I am vandalized.

  They are almost ready to begin the painting of the History in the first Great Hall. I cry silently as they balance the jade vat on the hollow of my throat. River holds the pen as he held my arms, and when he lays it down to rest, I can see it bears the same bruises.

  My jaw is broken. The Palace was too large and the first gables shattered the bone. My teeth were scattered like seeds. The vi
llagers scurried to gather them up and return them to River, their rightful owner. But now it will be perfect, and the blood that drips from my earlobe can be used as paint. There is, after all, no sense in waste.

  River has only just finished the inscription of their names. That was his proudest task, and it took a long time.

  Hot Winds Arrive

  I stayed with the statue as long as my belly would allow. The Ayako-body is demanding, however, and soon enough I did not wish to disturb it with the growls of hunger. I descended in sorrow, not knowing if I would have the strength to climb so high again.

  I devoured a mash of wild carrots, beans, and mushrooms; I pulled down ripe plums from the branches heavy with green. Mountain provides. The dream-pagoda was inside me then, a bone like any other, and I confess that I had already begun to think on the fourth floor, though I knew my mewling flesh to be to weak to attempt it.

  River washed me clean of tears and sweat and blood and dirt. He held me very tenderly in his current, as if I would break into five thousand pieces and float out to the sea. But I did not speak to him, though I could feel his disappointment at not being asked for a lesson in the summer, when he is at his best. River is such a proud creature. He loves display. He had an affair with Moon once, because she shone so prettily on his waters that he fell in love with her. It ended badly.

  I had nothing to ask him, my eyes had glazed over like gray water. He became sullen and his banks pouted. I thought of the Stone and how its face had vanished. If none one sees a face, perhaps it is as good as vanished. Perhaps I have no face, either.