“Nothing that concerns you,” the woman chuckles. She does something to her head scarf and I catch a flash of green. A feather?
“It does concern me, it’s why I was sent here—”
As she walks away, I lunge for her. I haven’t forgotten that I can have no contact with people, that I slip off and around and away from their awareness. Most people, all of them except this woman, who saw me even though it was impossible.
I don’t even brush the back of her T-shirt. Suddenly she and everything around here look very small and I’m caught in hardening molasses. I know it’s no good to keep trying but I can’t help it. She saw me, she heard me, she talked to me. If I could just get to her, even though I can barely see her—
To my surprise, she turns around and for a moment I think she’s looking at me. But all she sees is what anyone else would see: plants, a bench, translucent floor, more plants. There’s no one here but her. Anyone looking up from the lobby will see only one pair of footprints and three dots made by the wheels on her IV tree.
She turns away and leaves. But it’s another hour before I can move.
The Observant Lifestyle tells me to go back to King’s Cross and get a train to Brighton. I’m grouchy but I don’t feel like being stuck again so I do it. It’s a really slow train; it seems to crawl from one stop to the next. I page through the ebook repeatedly but there’s only the same blah text about making lists and ordering them by family or something.
It’s very late in the afternoon when the train gets to Brighton. I’ve never waited in this train station before, but I can’t imagine it’ll be much different.
I look out the window and see Madame waiting for me on the platform. There’s no way this can be good.
The first thing she does is take the iPad and give me a new one. It’s bigger and apparently fancier on the inside. But instead of letting me try it out, she tells me to put it away and walks me toward the beach.
In the beginning, I was surprised they used iPads and smartphones and the like. I mean, they aren’t bound by the strictures of the natural world so I thought maybe they’d have magic mirrors or something. But that’s what an iPad is, except it operates within the law on the macro level. On the micro level—that’s extreme micro—everything’s loose and runny enough to allow things to pass between the Continuous Realm of All Things and the natural world. That may be true—I have no basis to doubt it—but personally, I think all it means is, everyone, regardless of race, creed, or cosmic origin, is wackadoo for gadgets.
Except for those who’d rather fly. Which might be a lot. I mean, I can see the appeal. Who couldn’t? Well, besides Madame and everyone else in the Continuous Realm.
And who would that be, now that I’m thinking of it? Unbidden, the image of tiny footprints on a translucent floor blooms before my inner ear and I realise that’s the state of my existence. In the natural world, in the Continuous Blah Blah of Blah Blah, and all points between and beyond, it’s all just footprints, always out of reach.
I could have a breakdown but I know how that’ll go.
We reach the Brighton Pier and stop. It’s very late in the day now, almost dusk. I think I’m losing my sense of time, or maybe it’s vice versa.
I’m waiting for Madame to tell me she’s going to throw me into the water or something, but she doesn’t say a thing. Finally, I can’t stand it. “What now?” I blurt.
The way she looks at me, it’s like she forgot I was there. “What else? You continue to do your job.”
I’m not about to tell her that’s not what I was asking. Things are freaky enough.
“There’s no reason not to, just because a few birds have decided to muscle in,” she says. “So they make a few deals with humans. They won’t get all of them.”
“Then why did I go to the roof garden? What was the point?”
Her expression says I’m the stupidest person in the world. “Information gathering. Now we know.”
“But I only talked to one bird. No, two—”
“You weren’t the only one.” She sighs heavily. “Did you really think you were?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “Nobody tells me anything and I’m out here all by myself.”
“Fair enough.” She sighs again. “My choice would be to do away with solitary. But it’s not up to me.”
I mean to ask who in the Continuous Realm of All Things is in charge of that area. But what I hear myself say is, “What’s the Concomitant Rendition of All Tessitura?”
Several fleeting expressions pass over her face—shock, confusion, disbelief, horror, anger. I don’t know whether she’s going to hit me or hit me real hard. Then she laughs. “That’s where you came in. That’s you, as in the human race.”
“Oh, right. I’m a human. Sometimes I forget.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I want to bite my tongue off. I can’t believe my nerve. If she doesn’t call down a lightning bolt or something, I’ll probably be stuck for a month.
But she’s not mad, at least not yet. Madame’s not mad and it’s almost night now. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole for sure. Suddenly she grabs my face and makes me look toward the light dying over the water.
Countless small, dark bodies swarm upwards and come together in a way I’d have thought was impossible in the natural world, performing an aerial dance. I watch as they make forms that flow into shapes, that become symbols flowing into creatures flowing into forces flowing into renditions—renditions of—
And then it’s another day. I’m standing by the Brighton Pier with Madame, under a heavily overcast sky.
“I wanted you to see that,” she says.
I look the question at her.
“For many reasons, all of them difficult to articulate at this angle. To show you that a few parrots don’t know everything. Do you think humans could ever be capable of what you just saw—and still be human?”
“I bet a lot of them would like to try,” I say.
Madame laughs again. “I bet they would. We’ll just see. There are an infinite number of renditions, and not all of them desirable, no matter how attractive they might be.” She pauses, gazing at me thoughtfully. “I really don’t like solitary,” she says. “But I have to admit that sometimes, it’s the best bad choice there is.”
She looks down and I follow her gaze to see a shiny black feather at my feet. Immediately, I stoop to grab it, but when I straighten up and open my hand, there’s nothing. The feather is still on the ground.
“You need to give it another try or do you get the point?”
I turn away and walk back to the train station.
There’s a new ebook on the iPad called Symbols & Signifiers Throughout History. It sounds like it should be a lot more interesting than Twitchers but it isn’t.
I have a two-day wait in King’s Cross before my next job, which gives me enough time to see half of Harry Potter’s luggage trolley sticking out of a wall. Or maybe it’s not his, just some nameless witch’s or wizard’s. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
Before, in my natural-world life, I’d have oohed and aahed anyway. Magic—wow! But it’s nothing like that. Like I said, it’s really just a lot of work. And it never ends, and there’s no way out.
I guess that’s why they call it eternity.
The Acid Test
LIVIA LLEWELLYN
. . . the acid tests were much more than an excuse to trip for hours and hear The Dead play for a buck. No, there were people who passed and people who didn’t pass the test. We were trying to stop the coming end of the world.
—Timothy Leary
Someone calls on me or calls me or calls me out, I can’t tell over the sitars and drumming, but then Suzanne gives me the little strip of paper, and I don’t know, I really don’t want to do it, but the music is wailing consent and I’m already high, and it just seems easier to stick out my tongue and let it dissolve in silence than shout thank you no. At that point, there’s so much smoke in the room from all the grass and cloves and hashish that I’m already seeing dragons in the air, great snakes coiling and rippling against the beaded curtains and velvet curtains, horses with wings and beautiful birds with long hooked beaks whose wings brushed against the bookcases, knocking down textbooks and sending onionskin sheets of poetry floating through the air like large autumn leaves; or maybe that’s just everyone turned on and dancing, or knocking up against the shelves as they gas on and on about Chomsky and Searle and Leary and Marcuse. And the theatre kids talk about Sartre and Godot and a group of the really weird kids argue at the edges of the room about Heinlein and Ellison, while the prettiest girls huddle on the bed and whisper about the Michigan Murders and how all those coeds who look like them are just gone just vanished into the wide American night, the same way the pretty young boys are disappearing in the desert cities of the southwest, the same way wide-eyed freshmen disappear on every campus here in the Northwest from down in Eugene all the way up to here in little old Victoria BC, and I can’t care less about any of it to begin with because I’m an Ed major and no one wants to talk with me about Montessori education versus Waldorf, but I’d tried for the sake of beautiful Suzanne who’d been begging me to come to one of these stupid dorm mixers for a month now, and I didn’t have anything better to do tonight. And anyway there was a guy I’d seen, a guy who always hangs out at the edges of the theatre actors groupies at plays and mixers, never talking but only watching like a beautiful predator, tall and thin with the grooviest clothes and these huge brown eyes and jet-black hair, and I figured maybe he was a grad student because he just seemed so cool and calm and above it all so he probably wouldn’t show because this was a real amateur scene, but I thought he might be here anyway because this is a pretty big party and it’s the end of fall semester and there isn’t much else going on, and besides after this weekend everyone is going home for winter. But he isn’t here, and no one here is that cute or mysterious, and so what the fuck, right? I wash my tongue with the last of my beer and let the empty can roll out of my hand onto the carpet and under a desk. No one notices. I wait to see, I don’t know, dancing skeletons and far-out kaleidoscopes of universes and flowers and weird cartoon landscapes with purple penises trucking down candy cane roads, but everyone looks the same, just a bunch of college kids I don’t know, grooving to the music and having a gas, and Suzanne gets bored of me like she always does and wanders away into a bunch of admirers who are already tripping over that long Malibu Beach–blond hair of hers and that perfect kewpie-doll model face and soft brown nipples that peek out of the holes of her crocheted sea foam green dress and I realize we aren’t going back to the dorm together, not that we were supposed to because she always does her own thing even though we’ve been roommates three months now, and I stand up and the party seems to snap into focus as all the blood rushes back into my tingling legs, and I shakily push my way through the crowd and thumping bass and wailing sitars and suede fringe and Tibetan curtain beads hitting my face as people gyre like spinning tops, and then I’m spilling out into the hallway with the lovers and the fighters and the wanderers and the sick. All the people who can’t fit, who can’t find a way inside, and now, one again, I’m one of them too.
And so I curse those thoughts in me as I wander down the hall, discombobulated because it looks just like my dorm hallway and for one horrifyingly stretchy long moment I think it is my dorm or maybe there’s just one long dorm we’ve all been trapped and wandering through this semester and I’m just walking and walking eternally with no way forward or back, but then I reach the end and push my way down the stairs past all the kids tripping on the graffiti or grinding in the corners, and then I’m outside, the air so peppermint crisp and cold it almost burns my lungs and skin, dark white from snow glistening all across the campus and the soft hiss of flakes against my hot face, flakes like stars, stars and universes whirling all around me in the low wind. I reach out and let the galaxies drift and settle across my skeleton fingers, and out of the gray night fingers touch mine, long and smooth and autumn brown, and I hear the words hey girl as his face floats up from out of the crystal-white mist of the stars and snow and my breath, and there he is like a statue, eagle-nosed and black-eyed and that cool sardonicus grin. The tips of his fingers are smooth and warm, little electric circus shocks running through them into my bones and up my arms and spiraling at the back of my neck, his breath melting the ice on my lashes as he sidles up in the dark against me in his tight cords, fabric crushing and catching between our bodies, as his words fall against my burning cheeks once again, hey girl, this party is a drag, there’s a private scene happening over in the grad dorms, let me take you there. And now there is a Shift with a capital S that I feel in my feather-hollow body: I am above me and behind me and all around myself like snow like the prickling stars, watching in silence as he takes my hand, leads me down the walkway through the lawn and trees, deep into the campus, passing in and out of the pools of light under high sodium lamps, my long blond hair swaying back and forth against my aqua blue jacket, my long lean legs and round buttocks visible against the pale sea foam green of my crocheted dress, the dress that always looks so good on Suzanne, and a pale dim light flickers on inside my mind, deep in the foggy oceans of stars colliding throughout my brain as I realize that Suzanne had followed me outside, that the stone fox has been speaking to her, looking to her, he never saw me at all and when she speaks to him she speaks past through me, but I follow them anyway, stepping in her footprints and his, leaving no traces behind as I float and trip in their tracks, snatches of conversation and laughter wafting back with the midnight snow. Where did you say we’re going, I hear her soft pretty voice say, and I imagine how his face looks as he replies a secret spot in a basement of the dorms called the Purple Room, and oh how purple it is, ripe like grapes bursting on the killing floor of a distant sun, those long brows arching under the black fringe of his silken hair, as he licks his marble teeth and grins his thin-lipped grin, and Suzanne laughing and saying oh, see, everyone said you were such a square but I knew you always had it in you, languid stone fox, secret garden, murderer of possibilities, and he replies, and his reply is lost in all my pyroclastic-cold and clammy dreams.
I think she wants to give me kicks I hear him say, as they wander through the campus in the queer quartz light of the snowy night storm, and behind them I flicker in and out of their icy tracks, shivering as warm ribbons of smoke and acid realities flake off my body in shimmering strips, trailing behind me in a patchouli-scented wake. My beautiful Suzanne and the man, the beautiful boy, the stone fox, the sly seductive raptor of my secret waking dreams, walk side by side through the white drifts, hands running up and down their backs, their arms, resting on curves and in hollows, sliding beneath unbuttoned fabric as snatches of laughter and secret mutterings fade in and out with the wind, rise up and catch in the thick boughs; and eventually as I knew it would their long graceful gaits slow as they move closer together, limbs crossing and colliding, stumbling off the wide campus path into the scattering of trees, where they come to rest at the wide round base of an evergreen, Suzanne against the bark like a sliver of ice and the man enveloping her as though the tree itself were closing around her pale dress and skin, but then he moves her around, his back against the tree and legs firm in the crisp stiff layers of snow as he unwinds his long scarf and lets it coil down between his feet for Suzanne’s pretty knees, and her hands fluttering like white doves about his crotch and I hold my breath, let it build up in cold pillows behind my trembling lips and thickening tongue. The sodium lights are dull silver disks illuminating everything and nothing, and galaxies of bright snowflakes flock around Suzanne’s hair like crowns of celestial roses as she pulls his thick cock from out behind the brass buttons and rows of stitching and neat seams, resting the plump dark head on her red, red tongue; and as his cool demeanor melts at her touch, she moves her glossy wet lips up and down the shaft, working the skin back and forth with one turquoise-ringed hand while the other burrows deep and furtive into the fabric, deep between his legs, somewhere deep I cannot see, and his large hands move over her head, enveloping it like a Venus flytrap. Tiny flowers blossom and explode all around them, bright small roses and tiger lilies and orchids, spurting clouds of yellow pollen into their hair and over their limbs as their bodies sway back and forth, and when he comes, she grows rigid and waves of purple lightning crackle all up and down her body, leaving behind trails of shining glitter, the same glitter that pours out of her mouth as his cock slides back, the same glitter that drips and coats the tip; and glitter in the air all around us and I can feel the winter storm sigh and silence, and fluttering warmth floods my limbs as I shudder and fall against the strong trunk of a bristling true cedar, the faint scent of pitch nipping at my lungs as I recede into then fly up through the shadows, pulling my hand out of my burgundy cabled tights as my dark wings spread against the celestial arms of the Milky Way, and it’s all so beautiful and I can taste God at my fingertips, the tears of God that stream out from the primordial center of the world between my legs that is a perfect mirror of this sacred oval space of pure white snow and tall high trees and all the stars tangled up in the canopy of branches that bend down over Suzanne and the vulpine man bending over her, who pecks at her face like a mother kisses a child as his limbs part and divide into hundreds of feathery extensions that collide and wheel about his sharp bone white face, who raises his oil black unblinking eyes up past the branches to the starry airborne rivers of snow while his wings strike down again and again like a waterfall of black razors until she collapses at his feet in boneless folds of creamy skin, who bundles his now velveteen-soft cock back behind the thin folds of fabric and then bundles her gleaming ribs and femurs and fibulas and lovely smooth skull into a small jumbly barrow that catches the wind blowing through it and expels it like a lover’s song, who cracks his scarf in the air like a whip and wraps it back around his neck as he lifts her lifeless form up and continues down along the snowy path, carrying her like a deboned winter fox in the relentless beaked embrace of a nocturnal predator. All about us and behind the trees loom the great halls and cathedrals of learning, gothic spires and carillon bell towers of the great university church, red brick and marble and gray granite arches, stained-glass eyes winking in the now quiet night, and there is only one set of steps to follow in, to place my own starry feet in, footfalls that are deeper now, deep and flecked with dark rubies like the shining strands of rubies dripping off her hair and skin and flecking the stiff wet fabric of her sea foam gown that drops in wet folds and melting crimson fans all about them in the snow as he turns in his slow path to fix his unblinking oil eyes on me even while he carefully with clever fingers crams and works the soft worm flesh of my boneless roommate past those rows of bright teeth into his ever-widening throat, and even as I run run run like a frightened winter mouse I can’t help but listen carefully as I push my way through the drifts, can’t help but hear the sonorous soothing lilt of his beautiful hushed voice that echoes back and forth against the barren trees, that tells the woman in his gullet of the great and mysterious beauty of the Purple Room that she’ll never see now because she was a silly and impatient bitch who started too soon, but if Suzanne replies at all it’s in a voice too deep inside of him to tell.
Gather tales of all your failings, the creature commands me from her circuit high above the student lounge in the main building, floating in languid arcs around the thick cedar beams and cream balloon-shaped lamps that sway over the main room of the student center like ossifying mushrooms. From far above it watches me drop against the burnt orange of pillows and cushions, letting the thin warmth of the air creep its way back through my indigo-veined legs still wet from the lash of the branches and the thigh-high drifts when I ran, ran after the beautiful stranger and the silent Suzanne, her hair and long hair spilling out from both sides of his body like wings of white and gold as he buried her within him and disappeared into the swirling dark, ran until I entered the heart of the campus and I was all alone again with the dregs of other parties who’d crawled and stumbled and meandered their way through the glass double doors, needle-fine torrents of pain rolling through all our muscles like the nighttime waves of thunder snow outside. But now I just ignore her like I ignore all the others that crowd around her on the beam, the Suzanne-shaped birds with the pecked-out eyes and boneless torso, and all the other chicks dripping down mascara and blood, because it’s just the acid I say to myself, this is the bad part of the trip, the six-month visit to the underground part, the walk through the woods with the wolf to grandmother’s house part, the place in the story where I’m going down like all the other women in history, sliding right past that three-headed dog straight into the prickly warmth of hell, and so I tell myself I’m not seeing what I’m seeing, just like I didn’t really see out on the snowy paths to the dorms what I saw, that what happened is Suzanne is back at the party alive and dancing and running her hands up and down her California-tan body while all the boys and girls in the room nod and watch while in some other part of the campus the mysterious beautiful student falls asleep in the arms of a book or his woman, and there’s no thick ribbons of crimson snow crisping cold under icicle bones and endless sky. Someone’s brought a radio and they turn it on and now bottles of beer and whiskey are slipping out from underneath overcoats that plop onto the floor in damp heaps while dope and tobacco smoke begins to thread through the air, and the same conversations about philosophy and art and death and the universe begin again, only more muted and serious this time because we left all the parties behind and this isn’t a party, this is life and we’re students of life, I explain as I take a toke off whatever someone is holding to my lips, we’re taking life and taking it apart and examining each bit, each shining gleaming moment of it that exists both in our timeline and outside of it, history and the future, we’re astronauts riding in rockets of acid and mushrooms, traversing the vast cosmic expanse of our own uncharted unexplored selves, and I wonder out loud how far we’re willing to travel within ourselves to find something new and astonishing event if it’s terrible and not who we thought we were at all or who our parents tried to raise us to be, but maybe that dark place inside isn’t a new discovery but the oldest truest part of ourselves finally set free, free of rules and morals and culture, the primal original ur-self let loose after a lifetime of false and flaccid chains to be one with a world in which all these traps and trappings around us this furniture these clothes these sentences are infestations that keep us from taking our place within the universal mother god node of creation and destruction and deconstruction and rebirth. And some people nod and others disagree and others just stare up at the beams that cross the ceiling like the ribs of a landlocked ship, and everyone’s thoughts and words fill the air, sparking like the glowing embers of a contented and tired fire, and then someone asks the question, and I’m fairly certain that person is me, hey, have you guys heard anything about a place in the dorms called the Purple Room?
Even the most vague desire is a fire, and as soon as the words pour out of my mouth I hear the slight shift in the room, feel the hitch as if for a second everyone stopped talking, stopped breathing, a slight skip in the record that no one would notice unless they knew it was coming and even then they might miss it, but it’s there just the same, and everyone around me keeps talking and most people haven’t even heard the question, everyone’s broken off into couples and triads and quartets of discussions and debate and manic musings, but the tone has slightly changed, as if my saying the words added a layer of sound, as if everyone’s still getting their groove on without realizing that their needle’s been bumped into another groove. And the guy next to me with the long sideburns and wispy moustache who keeps grabbing the knee of his wild-eyed girlfriend nods for a long time as if the motion is dredging up the information like an oil derrick, and finally he says, yeah, man, I think I heard something about that my freshman year, I think, I think, yeah man, it’s some old basement storage locker or laundry room that a couple of dudes on the basketball team turned into this wild sex pad, yeah, yeah man, with carpeting and mattresses everywhere and they painted the walls and ceiling with all this black light paint and shit and they replaced the fluorescents with black lighting and the whole room was like, whoa man, so when you were making it with your woman and you were coming it was like you were tripping into another dimension or something with all the purple lights flashing and glowing, yeah. His girlfriend nods the entire time, mouthing the words no way man over and over again in between drags on her cigarette and pulls on a bottle of whiskey, and when her boyfriend is finished she stubs the cigarette out on the sofa arm and says you are so way off you’re not even on the planet anymore, man, not even in the fucking planetary system, I heard a bunch of religion students spent the summer in Tibet back in ’64, and when they came back they made a meditation room in the basement of their dorm with purple walls and lotus flowers and lidless eyes everywhere, and when you’re in the room and you start meditating and chanting, it helps you astral project right to the pyramids or wherever you want because it’s built in the middle of a power line, man, this line that’s part of a network of psychic rivers that run all over the planet and flow through time and space and all these dimensions, and you connect your pineal gland to the road, you just hit that astral road, man, you just chant your spirit straight to Stonehenge or some temple on the moon. She pauses to catch her breath and take a long swig of the whiskey while her boyfriend shakes his shaggy head and mutters no way man, no fucking way, and I ask her if she’s ever seen the room, does she know which dorm it’s supposed to be in, but she’s already deep in disagreement with the boy, and they’re lost to me in the seductive reflections of their discord, so I turn to the woman sitting in the chair to my right, all limp brown suede and faded paisley cotton under a body-length cocoon of half-removed parka, a beaded fringe tied across her head weeping bright glass seed beads into her damp flat hair, who’s been quietly listening to us the entire time with a growing furrow between her barely open eyes, and I ask her if she’s ever heard of the room. She blinks slowly, several times, and says in a low monotone, yeah, maybe, I think so, it’s one of those things everyone hears about but no one’s every met anyone who’s been there, one of those campus stories everyone tells each other, and every time someone tells the story a little bit changes, like those round robin gossip games we used to play at summer camp, remember those? Yeah, but the story I was told was that it’s a nest, a nest in the basement of one of the dorms, a room with purple walls all slick and wet and waxy-soft like a honey bee hive, with a door made out of twigs and branches and lost laundry and old books no one reads anymore and worn-down candles and incense sticks and glass sun catchers and the rib cages of lost chicks who stayed up too late and wandered through the halls past curfew, a jumble of things people threw away that block the door to protect the room, dead and lost things that warrior raptors who cry like sea gulls and fuck like wolves place against the door as protection for the void-queen that lays pulsing and birthing behind it . . . it’s holy work . . . we have no choice . . . Her voice trails off and her head rolls back against the chair, tiny seed beads scattering across her cheeks and shoulders as she passes out or trips into oblivion, and a delicate ribbon of stamps falls from her uncurling hand, and I realize as I reach over and slide the ribbon from her fingers and pop one square onto my tongue that I’ve come full circle and am right back where I started from. Just like two hours ago or three or four, the stamp melts against my hot saliva as I sit in the middle of a party watching people talk and laugh and drink and get it on while I stare at all of them, wondering where my place in all of it is or if there’s a place at all for me or if I really even care, because the one thing I wanted that night was to make it with that beautiful grad student, the one with the ragged black hair like torn silk brushing against his snow white forehead and cheeks and wide thin mouth, the iridescent mysterian who shows up in all my trips and nightmares and dreams, the black-eyed raptor in burgundy velvet who’s across the room opposite me right this moment, sitting on an olive green couch between a guy with one hand underneath the skirt of his wriggling girlfriend and an older woman with graying hair who’s hunched over and weeping into her hands, and I know he wasn’t there a moment ago, that the spot was empty, that he fizzled into life only when the acid disappeared on my tongue, as if he’s just always there waiting behind the high.
Shall I let them see reality? he asks, sitting with his inviting thighs opened wide, arms spread out across the backs of the cushions as if he’s ready to push off into flight, a long brown cigarillo as slender as an ancient rib in one raised hand as clean of blood as mine, the cherry flame tip coiling smoke into the air and around his head like a Catherine wheel, and my forehead grows warm and my vision blurs and the room washes away as we snap into each other’s focus, as our consciousness threads across the space like the smoke, ectoplasmic cords that plug in and connect our meridians, and now we are tuned in, and I feel my body grow limp even as the thoughts and colors in our collective mind grow crystal sharp, speaking to each other the rush of blood, the flutter of lashes, the magnetic whispers of the night just beyond the cold glass doors. Which story do you believe, little girl, he says as he taps the ashes away, letting them flutter over the slender waist of a boy passed out at the side of the chair, which story do you think is the closest to the truth, which version of the Purple Room do you want to see tonight? He smiles as I mouth my answer with silent lips and tongue, my words and thoughts already traveling through the meridians of his limbs, does Suzanne know which version is real, and he smiles so wide and so bright I squint and flinch as I wonder in horror if I’ll see her face pushing up from the back of his mouth, peeking out round-faced and wet from behind his joyful sharp incisors lining the edges of his predator grin, maybe it’s time the veil was torn from your glass-dark eyes floating out from his mouth (or Suzanne’s) in the cold quiet spaces between the music and the laughter and the soft murmurs of nothings he warbles sotto voce to the slender slip of the suede-clad chick that sidles into his lap as she whispers and will you be the one to tear the veil away, wrapping his arms around her shoulders like a cloak, and all the girl-shaped Suzanne birds hanging off the cedar rafters and their laughter echoing down at me as he ignores me, again, again, again, and again he burrows his black head in the perfect cream curves of the lithe sylph faded-paisley honey who is not me and I slide the bottle of whiskey out of the limp hands of the couple beside me, still locked in the barb-wired arms of their argument, let a long mouthful burn its pyroclastic way across my tongue and down my throat while the room grows warm and dark, and great mushroom shapes blossom and fester at the edges of the windows and glass-dark eyes, dropping to the ground in soft spore-puffing masses that burst apart like rotting whipped cream. The girl slithers off his lap and onto her feet and he follows, pulling away from the bodies surrounding him like he’s sloughing off all the disguises and guiles of previous lives, and they wend their way through the bodies and bobbing heads and nicotine conversations, the girl’s hip-twitching gait so much like Suzanne’s that I can’t help but glance upward at the boneless ghost birds as if to confirm that they see it too, see how much they are alike, or used to be, but the rafters are barren and in that slip of a second he’s already spirited her out of the room, the wake of their passage already fading and dissipating, fizzling like little bursts of psychic fireworks cobwebbing down to the ground, and once again I follow, earthbound and heavy this time, scattering purple dots like dying fireflies as I push through the trailing stream of their desire leading outside into the vast dark, through the leviathan’s graveyard of black skull buildings, the hardened mid-breath frost of the quiet campus, the crunch and crush of my feet against the snow as I make my way through galaxies of seed beads she scatters behind like my hardened tears flung across the stars to the stairs of my old freshman dorm.
Memories and dreams, the stains, the dead remains, jumble together in the wash of warm air against my face, the fading scents of patchouli and perfume and the mildewing sweat of winter-wet, threadbare carpets mingling with the cloying and depressing animal funk particular to every dorm I’ve ever lingered in, every boy’s room I ever crept in revulsion from late at night, every women’s bathroom shower stall I sobbed in through the desperate early hours of dawn, every strange concrete hallway lined with indistinguishable wooden doors and corkboards blanketed in flyers and messages, graded papers crumpled into garbage cans alongside empty bottles and broken lipsticks and letters finished but never sent, letters and love bracelets and unused ticket stubs and damp tissues and postcards from relatives who can’t understand why you won’t come home or call, pleas and pleadings from parents, phone numbers you’ve torn up and wadded up into mealy balls of paper too minuscule to resurrect, and photos of a childhood you did everything you could to escape from and would do anything you could to return to, a decisionless moment in life when the waters were calm and the sky clear and the future as limitless and unwritten and perfect as Suzanne’s lip gloss smile. And down linoleum-lined steps I pad, following whispering shadows that dance and pool out of cracks behind the crooked walls lining the abyssal basement hallway that skims the paralyzed skin of the planet, past rusting rows of washers and dryers hulking in pitch-black punctured with ribbons of light that dance and shimmer and curve up into bows only to untie themselves and start again, braiding themselves into an ouroboros that whips before the door of the janitor’s room, a heavy metal slab that bulges outward slightly as deep purple light oozes from around its frame, spraying upward and out in thick slow jets that splash against the almond-colored machines that hum in deep sonorous tones, moaning and buzzing as they detach from their concrete moorings and drift toward the ceiling as if escaping what is to come as I reach out and touch the door handle, so long and hard in my hand, so unavoidable and infinite, all the mechanisms of the cosmos whirling and clicking as tumblers in some other room in some other universe sighs and opens its singular eye, and my eyes roll back as I feel all the weight of another world flow Nile-wide up through my bones and veins, all the weightlessness of something moving in the next room, rearranging her infinite limbs as she bears down and lets out a sound that shatters atoms and sends galaxies scattering apart like dust as the dazzling white round tip of something larger than this universe presses against the lips of her cloaca, so white, as white as the drifts of snow forming around the midden of Suzanne’s bones, a void-white of un-creation contained only by the thinnest of egg shells, resting in steaming mountainous piles about the folds and feathers of her nesting flesh, waiting for the matter of this universe to stream in through the open door, eat away the delicate mottled prisons until . . . until . . . until . . . and his hand lightly touches mine, and I whimper only just a little as my broken fingers slide off the long handle, as I back away, trails of purple birthing matter clinging to my cheeks and throat, and the beautiful student with the jet-black hair and eyes like black pearls and raptor smile opens his mouth wide and first the paisley-clad girl slithers out in a wave of clear vomit, her long brown hair ribboning about her flat yet serene face like seaweed and her body hits the door in a slow wave, spreading across the cracks like jam, and then he convulses and barks out a second wet cough, and her hair looks so dark, her nipples so pale and tan skin shifting like beach dunes under a low tide as she flows apart and hits the door like dying glue, and deep in the back of my spine I feel the scream the plea the urgent cry for sight no more coalescing and pulling strands of all the shadows out of the room and up through the back of my head out through the center of my forehead and I grab the worm erupting from between my brows and twist it letting the blood of my thoughts run down my wrists and the world grows red at the edges, red dragons that shake their heads and flutter down like campfire ash over my bare limbs and he is over me now, dark and wide and wings spread about like a canopy of black tears, and that sharp stinging tap tap tapping all across my numbing face, and he is somewhere inside me, and from a great distance I hear his voice warbling like a love bird, I knew you always had it in you, languid stone fox, secret garden, murderer of possibilities, but if he hears my response, he’s too deep inside the empty cup of my mind for me to tell.
And the sirens have long stopped wailing, but their red and blue lights flash all across the campus, hundreds it seems, a poisonous garden of light silently blossoming in the winter sun. Birds flock in the bare branches overhead, clouds of glossy black that rise and fall with the movement of the men as they transport the bones to the ambulances and vans. Everyone’s story has been taken down, everyone who woke up in piles and heaps, running their dirty fingers across fuzzing teeth, adjusting torn clothes, creeping and shuddering their way from interrogations to their dorms and apartments, including my story of how I watched my roommate walk off into the snowy dark of night drunk and high and alone, never to be seen alive again. Outside in the hallway, the telephone rings over and over, crying out like a hungry abandoned bird, while beside me the radio on my headstand cackles with the news, and sometimes in the low afternoon light I think I see a faint movement behind its grooved surface, as if the machine is struggling to free itself from the invisible information pouring in and extruding out of the black plastic and metal of its captive brain. You’ll see things like that, he mutters, touching his long nose to the cold glass as he stares down into the chaos of his own creation, you’ll see them all the time now, because you see the reality of all things, you see beyond the surface of all this, and he presses his fingertips together, as if revolted at the touch of his own flesh, the same way you see me as I walk through the campus and through this dimension but also the real me, the multiple being folded and clipped and hobbled in this pellet of a body that seems to set all your hearts racing so, the body that has to work so hard to keep this little egg of a world intact and separate from all the other eggs of our greedy mother void-queen, and he moves from the window over to my bed, standing over me as I stare up into his face like a blade, and he leans down and grabs my breast with a grip so tight it makes me gasp as he whispers into my open mouth, don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to rid yourself all of this, and then I’ll teach you how much of them you can hold, and then I’ll show you all the other purple rooms, all the other doors, and when he kisses me with his acid tongue secreting little dribblings of his renderings of Suzanne and all the other chicks down my throat, I want to vomit in terror and disgust. But after a while the feeling passes and all that’s left is sharp and sweet as a punch.
The Crow Palace
PRIYA SHARMA
Birds are tricksters. Being small necessitates all kinds of wiles to survive but Corvidae, in all their glory as the raven, rook, jay, magpie, jackdaw, and crow have greater ambitions than that.
They have a plan.
I used to go into the garden with Dad and Pippa every morning, rain or shine, even on school days.
We lived in a house called The Beeches. Its three-acre garden had been parcelled off and flogged to developers before I was born, so it became one of a cluster of houses on an unadopted cul de sac.
Mature rhododendrons that flowered purple and red in spring lined the drive. The house was sheltered from prying eyes by tall hedges and the eponymous beech trees. Dad refused to cut them back despite neighbours’ pleas for more light and less leaf fall in the autumn. Dense foliage is perfect for nesting, he’d say.
Our garden was an avian haven. Elsa, who lived opposite, would bring over hanging feeders full of fat balls and teach us about the blue tits and cheeky sparrows who hung from them as they gorged. Stone nymphs held up bowls that Dad kept filled. Starlings splashed about in them. When they took flight they shed drops of water that shone like discarded diamonds. The green and gold on their wings caught the sun.
Pippa and I played while Dad dug over his vegetable patch at the weekends. The bloody chested robin followed him, seeking the soft bodied and spineless in the freshly turned earth.
Dad had built a bird table, of all things, to celebrate our birth. It was a complex construction with different tiers. Our job was to lay out daily offerings of nuts and meal worms. At eight I could reach its lower levels but Pippa, my twin, needed a footstool and for Dad to hold her steady so that she didn’t fall.
Elsa taught me to recognise our visitors and all their peculiarities and folklore. Sometimes there were jackdaws, rooks, and ravens but it was monopolised by crows, which is why I dubbed it the crow palace. Though not the largest of the Corvidae, they were strong and stout. I watched them see off interlopers, such as squirrels, who hoped to dine.
After leaving our offerings we’d withdraw to the sun room to watch them gather.
“Birdies,” Pippa would say and clap.
The patio doors bore the brunt of her excitement; fogged breath and palm prints. Snot, if she had a cold. She touched my arm when she wanted to get my attention, which came out as a clumsy thump.
“I can see.”
Hearing my tone, Pippa inched away, looking chastised.
Dad closed in on the other side with a forced, jovial, “You’re quiet, what’s up?”
It was always the same. How are you feeling? What can I get you? Are you hungry? Did you have a bad dream last night?
“I’m fine.” Not a child’s answer. I sounded uptight. I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to say, Go away. Your anxiety’s stifling me.
I put my forehead against the glass. In the far corner of the garden was the pond, which Dad had covered with safety mesh, unfortunately too late to stop Mum drowning herself in it. That’s where I found her, a jay perched on her back. It looked like it had pushed her in. That day the crow palace had been covered with carrion crows; bruisers whose shiny eyes were full of plots.