Myths of Origin Read online

  A whale’s ribcage is almost visible against the sky, long and bleached white. The comfort of its linearity glows in a spectral nova. And there is something comforting about the length and breadth, the Road like a woman’s smooth brown leg extended into the infinite, her toe brushing the corona of the sun, heel pressing the rim of eradication. Yes, it alters and mutates and flicks through its shapes like a nickelodeon, but it cradles me and keeps me and I am defined more by Walls and Roads now than limbs and brain. It is a wide womb and I am born over and over.

  It is a game we play. There is Vision here, to be stolen, seized, taken at knifepoint from the black-scaled baobab. Vision, yes, but no Will. Will has no meaning, or has lost it, under the dusty whitethorn leaves with their filtered light, no meaning behind or before the marauding Doors, no meaning in my palm or a greater one, crossed by arcane lines that I cannot read, cannot say. I move like the breath in a pan pipe, and walk as I may, but it ends in nothing, the Path determines. I am within the Colossus, within the Whale, and though my footfalls echo on its entrails and my voice stabs the lining of its stomach, I am in the fish and I go whither it swims. No meaning. I balance on a crown of babble, teetering and tottering on four-inch heels over a cobblestone Road, straps of biting black scoring my ankles with pricks of blood like decimals. The fan of four bones demarcate. My stride is weary with gin-streaked sighs. Grey sky wind in my face and breath of thorns. Swamps and marshes and crushed cellos, cracked air and bamboo beatings. There is no other than this Road that looks so linear and ever-going. Plod, plod, plod, one lacquered/unlacquered toe after another, red, white, red. Into the horizon, perpendicular I against the degreeless slope of hills and dales. All the paints in my boxes are ash, all the inks black. I carve my world in monochrome.

  I am at the sword-point of all amplitude and fold/unfolding. I reside in voluminous wreckage. It is beautiful, the hide of the leviathan reflected in mud-brick and trellis-work, the suggestion of a thing concealed: a Queen, a Talisman, a Treasure, a Castle, a Monster. At the very least some secret knowledge to be won. The threat of an oblong head rising blackly out of the water, lake beading off its reptilian brow makes the liquid promise shine with voluptuous beckoning. I am I, can be no other, and my little mind, encapsulated in skull and void, insists that a center exists within Wall after Wall. I promise myself not to think on it, knowing as well as I do that there is nothing, that the whisper is a lie, but I slip. I slip and drown in the root system of the Labyrinth.

  3

  Time flickers on and on.

  A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless—each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming and going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when I was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban. Crocus, narcissus, chrysanthemum, orchid. I name them for the air’s ears, for the benefit of the enclosing Walls, touching a thick petal with my tapered finger, one for each syllable. I walk rhythmically, battered tattered cloak folded under one arm.

  Today it is warm and the sun is on my back like a peacock’s fan. Hibiscus. Asphodel. I carry the Gardens with me, and name the flowers in infinite repetitions, even in my sleep the names trickle from my lips like blood, like rainwater. Delphinium, amaranthus, asiatic lily. Lotus, pennyroyal, poinsettia, marigold. Roses and opiate poppies and bluebells. The rain-washed flagstones bear the imprints of my sandaled and unsandaled feet, my pleading knees, walking the same Path again and again. Nephthytis, larkspur, foxglove, hyacinth. I do not pull weeds or comb the soil. I often catalogue, to pass the time, though it is equally useless since the topiaries and terrariums change like a dervish spinning. I note the growth patterns of hibiscus in the humidity of July. I commit to memory the cross-pollination of red dracaena and night-tulips. I twist moorland heather in my black hair. I walk in the green shadows of tropical leaves, in a contorted Babylon.

  The gold which is no-gold on my fingers is heavy, weighting me to this desert place which has no great umbilicus of river, rooting me to it, binding my body to these very shades of blackberry blossoms. This expanding microsecond now contracts so fast I cannot even touch its saturnine rim before it vanishes like the up-spiraling smoke of a silver hookah. But even to consider this pinwheeling threatens madness, to engulf the howling mind that weeps over every lost instant, crying to the rings of Jupiter to slow and remain in the center of one fuchsia-breasted moment. But non-linear travel is forbidden here, in the realm of the sternest of all gods, and I swoon (have, will, might) beneath the weight of such endless forward movement.

  I arrive often in a rosemary-scented Courtyard rimmed by manzanita trees, low and twisting. I have seen it perhaps seven or seven hundred times. It means nothing, not truly an arrival. The Sea laughs and beats a drum with blue-palmed hands down past the line of my vision, (but oh, I can hear it as it foams and thrills in my collarbone!) at the bottom of a convoluted Escher-like staircase, jumping and arching over itself, doubling back and spiraling crab-wise, chasing its long helix-body down to the edge of the tidepools. Into its stony flower-boxes and hedge-creatures I glide, still wrapped in my darkbody, leaving tattered scraps of shadow on the thorns as I pass. Didn’t I want to be a dark woman in some longagoothertime? The Labyrinth has covered every whiteness with violet petals and the dark pollen of night-lilies. I have crushed the thousand gardens into a vial of pigment to hide myself from its eyes, painted like a pagan, chasing after deer on the steppes. I march like a good soldier on the shell of a Sea-snail. It goes on and on. The Sea is unseen, beyond the Walls, and I will never float within its blue.

  4

  “It snapped at her,” a Thing intoned.

  “Did the Door, and she fell in, downdowndowndowndown. Silly, running—why grumble, greymalkin, when there are violets about, and sweet?”

  It was a pair of fat auburn haunches, chocolate and honey, fur like velvet gloves, long, eloquent ears pink as girlhood. It startled me, this new thing. An enormous Great Hare sat calmly on a patch of thick grass and wildflowers, as though guarding a corn-maiden’s tomb. I marshaled language like reticent troops in my dappled head, so long had passed without another Voice but the echo of mine. Her nose twitched, staring with liquid eyes, chewing industriously on the lip of a daisy.

  “Did the Door and swifter than I could. Was it a nice Door? Was it soft and delicious? Did it lead to a sweet thicket? Will you see its teeth when it comes like a hound? Silly girl-thing, why not stay and flower-eat? Wait and they will come. You will travel well enough.”

  The Hare stretched her long feet as though trying for a marathon. She nibbled at a toe, yawned. Nonplussed, I reached out a hand to scratch her head, and she leaned warmly into my palm.

  “Where did you come from?” I touched, gingerly, her face.

  “Away! Away and away and away and away! Do you know the Way? I do, I do, I do! I am the flower-eater and the grass-devourer. I am the swift sun-runner and the apple-thief. I know the secret. What are you?”

  “I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze. And no Door has ever caught me.” The Hare wriggled her silky muzzle and ground her teeth in derision. A massive foot slapped against the ground as the air filled with rabbit-laughter.

  “So certain. So full of titles. So proud. Did the Door and swifter than I. Inevitability is the color of water. Movement is a waste. They will find you. I did.”

  “Were you looking for me?” I asked incredulously.

  “I looked for breakfast.” A sprig of heather disappeared into her little mouth. “Breakfast beckons the strange and you are strangest of all. Eat. Drink. Why punish the earth with your girlfeet? There is sweetgrass and wild lettuce and savory roses—these
are enough. Why can you not let it be enough? They are alkaline, syrup-filled, fine as baker’s sugar, and they will coat our throats like warm toffee, like brandy and olive oil, and make us beautiful. The Way escapes you. It will always escape you. Downdowndowndowndown.” She snorted and stroked one long, brown ear. “I am the swift sun-runner. My feet are better than yours. Yet still. Still did the Door and brought me. Now I am here with the roses like buttered artichoke hearts and a girlfooted creature insisting on motion.”

  I drew aimlessly in the black soil with a tapered finger. Circles, one after the other, each as starless as the last. Downstrokes like bypass surgeries, heart beating like a bavarian choir. I could stay, I could vomit galaxies into this earth and never burn my throat with light, wearing scalpels like jewelry, wrapping my body in bloody togas, reciting my own eulogy with a mouthful of cat’s eye marbles and agaric mushrooms, arm jutting out awkwardly into the world.

  I touched her, her softness and earthlight. She laid her head against me, speaking with a barbed intimacy. “What is the secret you know?” I asked.

  “Blue Door it was,” she answered, “covered with stars-nine-pointed. Hiding in the raspberry brambles. It snapped at me, clapped on me just like a farmer’s big hands. It leapt; I was not swift that day. Downdowndown. I don’t run anymore, I am not prey. I wait, and swallow things when they come.” She looked at me with brittle eyes, glittering full of the light of the sun on the violets. She was very big, staring straight at me, our heads level. “Stay with me and eat well. Fall through a hundredhundredhundred Doors with me. There are always roses enough. After awhile, even the falling is gentle.”

  By now my fingers were thoroughly tangled in her fur, sepia over onyx, swift over slow. I wanted her warmth within me like the Compass, to devour it and hold it still, to take her peace like a pretty ring. But pretty things are all beyond me.

  Disentangling, I gathered up a few fallen petals, and met her limpid eyes through a forest of lashes, gently pulling back, and speaking low.

  “I am the Seeker-After, I cannot. I must Go, despite the roses.”

  “There is nothing,” the Hare assured me, shrugging her autumn-shaded shoulders. “That is my secret. There is no Way—only the staying still and the quiet. The waiting and the melting of a rose petal on the tongue.”

  5

  My ankle has swollen apple-huge.

  As though I were incubating some warm and throbbing egg between my cuneiform bones, the pinch of white hands gripping me tightly during the anointment of the Styx. Humidity sighs orchids and seasmoke through my hair, the vibration of a string bass on the westerly wind, blowing off the invisible Sea in trailing puffs. The moon like a garlic bulb scenting the sky, throwing out starry pale green shoots, glowing between raindrops.

  Here am I laughing like the Hare, my girlfeet pierced with honeyed stigmata. Here am I bright as a dueling pistol in the dawn, hobbled and kept still by strange circles turning beneath the skin of my darkbody. I cover my translucent feet with the hem of my skirt, so as to expose what they contain. that perfect Greek ankle, palpitating for the advent of a Serpent, the auroral revelation of a penetrating arrow. I have swallowed the Road, I have eaten death. Hard, coarse black bread crumbling on the teeth like fallout; warmth like oak-honey clogging the cilia with its liquid sibilance. I am awake, I am asleep, I am a somnambulist who each night presses herself between the Walls, in among tiger-spiders. I eat clay and drink dust beside kings whose names I have forgotten or never knew, because we have both refused the gods and their perfumed eyes. We stare ahead and calculate the burn rates of white dwarf stars to pass the time.

  I dwell within this invisible ravage, the scald of temptation. Stay within the white wheat the silver and the star, stay within the Wall and the Garden greaves, folded into a rose like an exhausted bee, gold enfolded in scarlet, and sleep forever with a sugared violet pressed on my tongue like a coin on a corpse’s eye. Oh, but it is beautiful, to sleep and to rest and to walk no more. The radiance of true nothingness set against the glimmer of its threat. It would have been a breath of gold to lie against that great leaf-shaded flank, the prickle of sepia-silken fur under my limbs, those pupilless eyes above me like secret moons for all time in the shade of aster-breathing Doors with their sulfurous hinges and studded with heliotrope. They would rise like suns over our sleeping shapes, bodies curved into symbology, and we would fall a hundred times a hundred until the falling was all that existed, the tumbling of her lucent haunches and my hair trailing like kelp on the Sea. Downdowndowndowndown.

  Wouldn’t it be better than this, the Road cutting vision, the Walls containing shocks of self, bolts of tawny motion? The peace of the fall, the certitude, the gentility of surrender. Long railway of silence into the depths that Doors must conceal. How everything here becomes luminous through the illimitable veils of concealment. Seduction shivers through me, the obscene, serpentine promise of what is not known, navigated, charted. Not split like the trunk of a tree into what I have walked and what I will walk. Not the inarguable vastness of the Labyrinth.

  But. I accept. I pull back at the threshold, shunning liminal space for the within-ness of Here. I go up the Staircase, and the world is still pressed like a dragonfly in ice. I never touch Edge or Center, never Entrance nor Exit, but remain somewhere inside, hanging pendulously among the trembling owl-winged scales embracing all those who fall.

  It is late, it is early, it is dark, it is light. How I lust for light, all light. Did I once beneath the apple trees stand scrubbed clean and pink by the sun, white flowers trailing my heels, laughter shaking the red fruit from the branch, eyes pools of August skies? Is this the alwaysnow, under the yew trees with violet flowers bleeding into my hair, learning desert tongues from the moon and carving whitethorn sculptures of Rabbits and Doors. But the green softness of the wood under my silver knife excites me. There is nothing in my footprints, not even dust, not even the ridges of a usual foot. One feather-fanned mark in the Road drags more than the other, the thorn in my heel pulling back towards the little patch of grass, back towards liquid coffee eyes, back towards those endless roses. The alexandrine tooth of a hare embedded in that hollow where skin is a papery wing over quivering bone, thorn-chaining me into stillness. Checking my movements—black queen to e4.

  I enter, near dawn, a twisted tower of ice, of glass. The Labyrinth here has fallen into freeze, the Road disappeared beneath cream-cobalt crystal, reflecting, refracting, eating the color of sky like winter soup. It reflects the small, silent colors of sunrise onto my deepened skin, blue over black, rippling, sighing. Fountains still in stop-motion, cresting wave of water arching through the sky, a cascade of diamonds. All the earth has become a diamond, a faceted jewel pulsing like a heart. Whiteness devours. I am caught in this freeze-frame, the same few seconds of film over and over, the same cold moonlight, the same tinkling piano, the same villain in the shadows, the same ingenue. At least it is white, under the veil of silver and blown glass that admits no imperfection. That banishes original sin. In this world, my lips are perfect, my skin snowy.

  The beautiful darkbody flees in the face of all this hoary paleness—the Labyrinth has stolen it. I am bloodless—snow hair falls to my waist, pupilirisall vanishes into classical eyes of milky stillness, though my sight remains. The jet of my tongue shrieks into the air, a mouth of chalk remains. I am a long scroll of blank paper, all color ripped from me like a gown. I stagger with the violence of tearing. The flowers are a graceful gasp under the silver Sea. The elegant bannisters of staircases, gone to blown glass and aquamarine. Shall I go up? Shall I go down?

  6

  Hic monstra delitescunt . . .

  I could not say, I could not say. Whether there are monsters hereabout. I have said that I am not exactly alone, but then, I am not exactly togetherwith, either. I have seen things, in the shadows, but who is to say? I dance on the leeward side of the mandrake Wall and a quarter of my iris rebels into violet, the Walls march in a phalanx and my body becomes quicksilver, sh
ining as a trout in the river, illuminating the spear-leaves and wizard-staff stems, reflecting on my rippling skin the wormwood and the moonseed, the orris root and the milkweed. Who can ever know what I have seen there revealed? The shadows know, in their depths and scrying sleek. Whether when I in a fever cross a drawbridge made for children with smaller feet than I, a troll with ambergris eyes lurks delicately beneath the creaking wood. Whether at the Center-which-is-not of all of this rests a quiescent Minotaur, his horns resplendent with blood and ash, death in an amulet around his neck, eyes like shuriken, a great brass ring in his poisonvelvet nose. Whether his volcanic heart thumps in time to mine, whether he waits for me in the geometric darkness, to wed himself to the Labyrinth forever in the sacred ritual of my dismemberment.

  Will I serve as a corridor between them? I fear a Minotaur. I fear hooves tramping in showers of the white blood of lotuses, crushing Franciscan bones under him. Hooves separating brow from skull, viscera of the “I” that is me digested through a Maze of four stomachs (for do not all we Labyrinth creatures carry the turning Path inside us. We carry so much, all of us pregnant with incident.) I fear a Lair of rattling sternums and tibia, prayer ropes and iron ore. But there is no Center to house a Lair to hold a Beast, so if one echoes in this place, he must roar his acidic throat to razors among the halls of where-I-have-not-walked, and stalks, a hunter like the rest. Some ways back I saw a pile of Doors splintered and broken like moldered corpses. They had a smell of rotted almonds and shoe leather. Am I to be as they are, cracked and bleeding in the jeweled hinges of a vengeful Gate?