Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 Read online

  "Come get me! Take me, take me, take me!” My screams went on, unavailing. My nightmare father strode outside, implacable.

  The alchemist's sun, trapped in a bottle, burned for freedom, its enormous spangled flames shooting up to the ceiling. An emptiness that dwelled inside the hood of night called me: Blaise, Blaise, Blaise .....

  "Vesta! Ves-ta! Vesta—"

  I sobbed until the words blurred into nothingness. Eventually, I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed, legs dangling. The fire had receded to a safe distance. I listened hard to steps that echoed down a long hall, until they ended in silence.

  I counted the minutes because I knew.

  I did not raise my head to look but counted one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, like that. Because I knew the alchemical process was not complete. Such a blaze could not go out so easily. The remains smoldered, occasionally snapped with sparks. A rumor of steps: soon mounting in intensity and becoming slaps and then thunder in the infinite hallway as the fire increased, fed by noise, until it touched not just the glass floor but ceiling and four walls, and I was metamorphosing to gold and shrieking—Mama! Mama, save me!—though my mother was surely in the remotest district of the library and could not hear or help.

  Immolation. Burnt sacrifice. I woke, trembling, moist with sweat, my skin smelling like lead. For some time my thoughts were confused; then I remembered the crack between the tiles. Although I wanted the blank of a dreamless sleep, I forced myself to get up and pad down the hall to the living room. Moonlight trickled across the stones. The chink seemed subtly larger than before. I lay on the pane that divided me from the girl and stared at her face, washed by moon glow. A long time had fled since I had been exactly the right size to fit on the case, yet I still pressed against its hard, slick surface.

  "Vesta.” I yielded to drowsiness, and in the morning my cheek was stuck to the glass.

  The breach in the floor aroused no fresh concern in my parents. They seemed, rather, to be relieved from an old dread and to have expected such an eventuality. By the end of the second day, the irregular slit was about seventeen inches long and nearly four inches wide at the widest point. Another day later, tiles began to shatter and tumble into the hole. I hung over the lip, craning to see bottom, but could detect only fog and flares of ruddy light. Nor could I tell when the fragments of clay struck any remote solidity.

  Little by little, the room was tugged apart. Vapors poured from the damaged floor. In less than a month, a canyon some four feet wide and thirteen long gaped before me. The stench seemed to do me no harm, although a line of poetry from the library drifted into my mind and made me wonder if its influence might be subtle, a taint: “internal difference / Where the meanings are.” Intermittently an edge would give way, collapsing in a shower of shards. Once I glimpsed lizards moving in mazy patterns a few feet below the brink. Though I assumed that their motions were senseless, later on I wondered if they could have had purpose. The sooty, red-eyed creatures inspired an instinctive revulsion.

  Out of reluctance, I have failed to mention the most important features of this domestic cataclysm, having to do with the plan of the house and with Vesta. Because it had been designed to narrow down to a single chamber at the living room, the building was soon chopped in twain. This queer state of affairs went unacknowledged by any word from my parents, who resorted first to jumping and later to navigating via ladders laid across the opening and anchored to form bridges. Most of the time, however, they simply stayed in their own preferred regions on either side of the fissure. Although I, too, crawled on the ladders, I never failed to plumb the depths of an intense terror when peering down through the rungs at globes of fire, floating in the smoke.

  Vesta was my mantra on these journeys.

  My father took a certain professional interest in the gaseous exhalations emanating from the gulf and penetrating the two halves of the living room. Seldom did he make the crossing without collection devices—a jumble of beakers, rubber tubing, glass retorts, and other alchemical-looking paraphernalia. I believe this curiosity of his led to a number of the explosions in his laboratories.

  "What's happening?” I asked, thinking that his scientific knowledge might explain what I could not fathom.

  He emitted a sharp laugh. “Don't bother me."

  My mother looked helpless when I asked her in turn.

  "Your father and I,” she said hesitantly, but got no further.

  A signal event associated with the opening of the chasm was the near-loss of the girl in glass. By the close of the fourth week, she jutted headfirst into the rift. For the first time, I could see her from a fresh angle, but I could no longer stretch out on the box without fear. Neither could I have done so without becoming dizzy and perhaps sickened and confused by the vapors from the pit, for their odor had become more acrid as the days passed. I would crawl as close as possible and lie down, my eyes on her profile. Occasional blossoms of fire rocketed from the depths, falling back harmlessly or landing like a kiss on the glass pane that shielded her face.

  "Vesta, what if you fell?"

  My whisper surprised me, and I was startled by a wish that the floor would crumble and release her. I imagined the box rocketing through the air. I saw a hurled flower, a red comet with a tail of shattered tiles, a queen bee chased by a swarm: kaleidoscopic flights and freedom. I reproached myself. The swirl of images had the nature of a sin embraced, or a blasphemy uttered while praying.

  The days fly, and the years ..... and yet I know nothing but books and the paths in the courtyard. I am a man, so my grandmother says, now that I am fifteen. On my birthday, she gave me a feather of red and gold, presented to her long ago by the nursery maid. Prince Krakus had snatched it from the wing of a firebird. How did a poor girl manage to obtain such a royal favor, I wonder? I'll never know, unless the answer's hidden in the library.

  Stitching in the window seat, my mother has made me black mourning clothes, and when I look at myself in the mirror I am not displeased. The feather makes a dash of red in a buttonhole. Mama is grieving for the future, I suspect, just as she has done for the past. I close my eyes and picture a child, a boy in velvet pants and a white blouse frothy with lace. Back then I saw; I sensed. Yet I only stored what happened in memory. Perhaps I couldn't bear to consider what anything meant. Perhaps the strife of attempting such a thing would have led to a spontaneous combustion, the invisible aura around my body catching fire and rendering me down to charred bone and teeth.

  Taking up my toy sword, I whip the air.

  Yesterday I ran from room to room, and when I found my mother, I told her the news.

  "I am leaving home to seek my fortune!"

  What else could it be? Long ago she had taught me, reading from the house's treasure of storybooks, what a man does. He leaves his house and seeks adventure in the wild wideness, with its huts and caves and castles. When Mama laid her head on my shoulder, I could see how small she had grown.

  Today my mother is in hiding and cannot be traced, but tomorrow I will take her hands once more before I run room by room through the world. I know that there will be times when I wonder if my story is not already complete, rather than about to begin. Some days I'll fear—as I do now—that I was consumed entirely by fire, and that what I'm living now is a kind of afterlife. Perhaps I am a human phoenix, who in a dream was scorched to ash, or reduced to a mere egg waiting to hatch. Perhaps this life is not a real life but only a veil, torn asunder but still covering the face of the living world. So close, so close: perhaps I have touched it with these fingertips that were once melted in flame and now have not so much as a whorl of maze to differentiate them. When I am fully a man, tested by adventure, I hope to know everything. The books I read in our library have told me that the years are worlds, and the lands, and the past is only a place one cannot reach.

  I wonder what my father will say when he notices that I have gone.

  Will he mutter to my grandmother that they both had a part in
my metamorphosis?

  I won't—can't bear to—consider my mother's sorrow.

  And what of Vesta, the perfect child in the glass box, jutting into the abyss, all that was she drawn inward? Long ago I rocked from side to side, sending forth prayers that were like kisses of fire rising from an abyss. Sybil and sibling, Vesta, my idol: I never felt a final conviction that you were dead to me and unreachable, and I still don't.

  At night when I dream, I see you face to face, though we are severed by a single pane, and I wake to cool drops of grief on my skin. The flame of those dreams is pale as moonshine.

  My sister burns, snowy and purified, her lavender eyelids sealed. She may fall, a star, into the breach. The glass may melt in a lake of fire. I don't know. I've never known how it is with Vesta. She may float down as softly as a snowflake sifting from a cloud. The glow from her face may turn the lake to a moonglade and the salamanders to silver.

  Is she, too, a phoenix? What then, I wonder, will be the manner of her uprising?

  The universe is bigger than anyone ever told me. Sky with its endless manifestations of cloud and spark tells me so. I stand in the courtyard and daydream about the kings and queens and the helping animals and unexpected friends that I will meet along the way. I wonder if I am to go traveling as the prince or as the foolish Hans, and whether gifts will be granted—or will I be chucked like a log into the witch's fire? Eagles fly overhead, screaming messages from another world. I do not know if their cries spiral from the throats of demons or seraphim.

  In sleep, when I stare into my sister's open eyes, I realize that their blue is the color of mercy.

  She is my vestal, and I, Blaise, am her fire.

  Daydreaming of my fortune, I hear a voice and am surprised to find it my own, saying, Let Vesta be with me, every furlong and fathom of the way.

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  Invisible Hand

  Anil Menon

  About the time Hitler had decided that a toothbrush moustache was just the thing to wow the ladies, the Hindu Gods gathered for a chat. Of course, not all the 330 million Gods met. Just the board: Lord Brahma the Creator, Lord Vishnu the Preserver and Lord Shiva the Destroyer.

  Lord Brahma came on his majestic Goose (almost a swan, really), Lord Vishnu had his Garuda, and Lord Shiva arrived on his bull, Nandi, late as usual. It was futile to try to hurry Nandi; the bull ran the world's traffic and was a stickler about rules.

  Since Lord Shiva had called the little meeting, the other two Gods waited for the blue-throated one to begin. Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu were excited—curious (so to speak). When the Trimukha finally spoke, it was in fonts of thunder, italicized by lightning.

  "I'm bored,” said Lord Shiva. “I'm tired of being the Destroyer."

  Garuda shrieked, startling the Divine Goose. Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma were perturbed, to say the least. Their perturbation altered the courses of a billion stars by a zepto-second. On a blue-eyed world, a thirty-year old Swede from Mjolby would die under a thirteen-ton avalanche of peas. So on and so forth.

  "I am weary of Destruction,” said Lord Shiva, as if nothing had happened. “My sinuses are swollen with death. I'm tired of the endless games of dice with Lady Parvati, which I'm destined to lose in any case. The world needs a Destroyer, true, but enough is enough. Either I do something else, or I will destroy the Destroyer."

  "But I say, old chap,” said Lord Brahma, “either alternative condemns the Universe."

  "Couldn't care less,” said Lord Shiva.

  "But my dear fellow,” twittered Lord Brahma.

  Much to the bull's annoyance, the two prongs of the dilemma chose to settle on its head.

  "I am bound by my necessities,” said Lord Shiva.

  It's a terrible thing when a God speaks of necessities. Who is free from Necessity, if not a God?

  (In fact, on a twin-mooned planet the color of agate, there's a species of carbon-abhorring, seal-like philosophers who consider Choice to be synonymous with God. Their prayers are acts of choice, and their theology, Economics.)

  Lord Vishnu retreated to the shade of Shesha, the thousand-hooded Cobra that winds around the Universe and rests on the eternal quantum sea. His beloved consort, Laxmi, the buxom, kind-hearted Goddess of Prosperity, soothed his troubled brow.

  "How can I preserve that which does not desire to be preserved?” asked Lord Vishnu. “My job is to preserve things as they are, not things as they want to be. How unprofessional of Shiva to renege on his duty. He knows the Bhagavad-Gita as well as I do."

  "Let Lord Brahma worry about it, dear one."

  But since Lord Vishnu was also Lord Brahma (the Brahman is One), he worried endlessly. In vain did the Divine Consort massage her Lord's lotus feet, in vain did she offer her milk-white, rose-tipped breasts, and in vain did she sing to soothe her Lord's dreams. Prosperity has no solution for ennui.

  Perhaps a year passed. Perhaps a billion years passed. Who keeps track of Time when you're Time itself? At last the Divine Consort, at wit's end, appealed to her sister, Lady Saraswati, the Goddess of Wisdom.

  "O wise and gentle one, learned in all the sixty-four arts, contrive a solution for my husband and your father."

  "You only had to ask, dear sister. Here I was, knowing I must interfere but unwilling to do so."

  At an opportune time, the Goddess Saraswati began to strum her seven-stringed veena. At first the music clung to her sari, reluctant to leave her side. But then it took wing; a rippling across lakes, a rising of birds, and the green rustle of trees making visible the wind. Lord Brahma had an idea.

  "Let Vishnu become the Destroyer. Let Shiva become the Preserver. I shall remain as I am, since every transformation, if it's to be smooth and continuous, must have a fixed point."

  (A neuron fires on a blue-eyed world. It is 1909, and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer puts down his coffee cup with a trembling hand. It has just struck him that a slowly stirred cup of coffee must have at least one point that remains unmoved. Years later, another strange fellow, John Nash, will show that this is exactly the same as saying that the game of Hex can never end in a draw. Brouwer, tetrahedron-faced genius, hears voices. He calls their counsel Intuitionism.)

  Lord Shiva is elated at the solution.

  "Henceforth,” predicts the Lord of Vows, “I shall preserve rather than destroy. Put away the dice game, dear wife."

  So Lord Vishnu took over the Dept. of Destruction. Lord Shiva moved into the Dept. of Jams and Preserves.

  There is a phenomenon, known to Unix aficionados as the mad-newbie syndrome. The newbie orders the removal of a trivial file and ends up removing the entire operating system, including the keyboard. There is rarely any laughter in the cubicles. It's a lucky mad-newbie that escapes castration.

  Lord Vishnu was a mad-newbie. He sought to delete a silly, trivial, utterly pointless photon headed nowhere and nowhen. Lo and behold! Most matter in the Universe promptly disappeared.

  "What the &!%!” screamed Lord Brahma, as he fell through Nothingness.

  But Lord Vishnu was just getting started. A second delete removed quintessence from every conceivable object; anything could become anything else if it tried hard enough. A third delete removed the capacity to undo.

  "Stop, O Naika!” said Lord Brahma, now truly terrified. Even terror has its creative manifestations. The origin of the monkey puzzle tree—so ugly that it has to reproduce asexually—is often traced to this utterance.

  Lord Shiva was not singing tra-la-la either. He was able to retrieve the missing matter, but turned it so black that no one, not even the Gods, could see it in the dark. He was unable to undo the removal of the undo (naturally!), and so patched in a facsimile. But alas, now a double-undo of something was not the same as doing that something in the first place.

  (A neuron fires on a blue-eyed world. It is 1923, and Jan Brouwer is putting the finishing touches to his paper, “?ber die Bedeutung des Satzes vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten in der Mathematik” which in English, means “On t
he Significance of the Excluded Middle in Mathematics.” The significance, just to be clear, is that not-not-X is not X. The voices tell Brouwer that the world doesn't have to choose between X and not-X.)

  Lord Shiva resigns. So does Lord Vishnu. No words are exchanged as desks are cleared, and carton and poster carried out. The little experiment is over. There is no question of going back; the undo had been undone after all. If it has proved that Lord Vishnu is a lousy Destroyer, it has also proved that he is a good Protector. Obverse ditto for Lord Shiva. There is an exhausted peace in heaven.

  The wives are not amused. They love their men, but there is only one world after all. They have their own meeting, in which they plait each other's lustrous hair, share jasmine-scented secrets, complain in rhythmic couplets and have a lot of laughs.

  As Lady Parvati rose from her seat, her sideways glance at her sisters dissolved the mother in all things. Her girdle unfastened and slipped from her incomparable waist.

  "Go, dear sister,” said Lady Laxmi smiling, as she helped re-fasten the jeweled girdle. “May success flower your path."

  Arousal is a season of the Gods. The tormented navel, the rouge-stained feet, the moist surrender of thighs, the abandon of white lilies, the crumpled defeat of linen ..... the lovemaking of Gods, the Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari assures us, is a lot like ours, only more so. At some point, the goddess Parvati reached for her Lord.

  "My Lord,” she said, her voice silvered with promise and peril, “please dance for me. You know I love it so."

  "Beloved,” replied the Bhairava, “I know what it is that you seek. And yet."

  So the Lord danced. The ancients say that the Gods, all 330 million of them, gathered to watch. Last time around, the great Kalidasa had burst into a thousand shards of poetry. A War God, Kumara, had been born. What could happen this time around?

  "O Nataraja,” breathed the divine Parvati, her face aflame like a Kimsuka tree with a billion flowers. “When you raise your left leg just so ....."