Anteroom
THE MAN AWOKE, nostrils plugged with slate dust as if he had become mineral. Half animate, he felt, but could not comprehend, that his right eyeball had been lying against the stone, rendering it misshapen. Blinking, his eyelid would not close over the flat-sided bulb. He tried to rise but found the impulse would not direct his limbs but only drifted toward his extremities like a handful of dirt settling in a still pond. When his fingers flexed, they traced tremulous ant trails in the slate.
A scratching pierced the stone man’s scab of deafness. To turn his head toward the sound seemed as impossible as twisting a tree stump rooted in the ground. The effort wrung from him a groan, but more ancient, like the croak of the first fish to lift its scaly head from the water.
His wits coalesced. The slate that dusted him was the surface of some cellar floor. The closeness of the air around him, and the way sound fell dead nearby, suggested he lay in a tiny space, little more than a generously proportioned grave. In the vault of this peculiar oblivion, there were lines of flickering light, like a lamp shining through the seams of a rudely constructed door. Formless shadows broke the light that, by their shadows moving, seemed cast by living figures. The obscurities flitted, paused, whispered to each other. Thoughts freed from self-consciousness, a buried Narcissus, he believed everything they said must be about him. He was correct.
Instead of pain, he felt an ache that pierced him like a bad memory. The tears shed from his eyes rolled into tiny balls of mud as they coursed down his dusty cheek. Somewhere beyond his brow, far away, a more consequential wetness worried him, but the effort to feel the crown of his head was monumental. He felt split, rent, and discarded. He remembered a dream he’d had as a child, of shrinking so small he could enter a gopher’s lodge, slipping down its passages as soil and stone brushed his lips. It was not a nightmare, but it broke his heart. His father would drop torches in the burrows and brain the creatures with a spade as they rose to escape the smoke. On his father’s lips, the purse of satisfaction he made at a stockyard bargain.
If he was sure of anything in this pit, as he shed from his brow some vital essence that he could not name, it was of the pure inconsequence of his existence. If one pebble had tumbled from the back of another in the most obscure corner of the darkest valley in the back of the moon, it would matter as much as him to his fellow men. In his abjectness he became a supernova of self-pity. Imagining himself posted in the sky like Orion, he was visible to brokenhearted mothers everywhere, in broad daylight. They would come out of their dugouts and soddies, these women of the Kansas plains, and point with their lye-scorched forefingers at the abandoned boy in the sky, prone and smashed and forever beyond their arms to embrace.
He wanted his mother now. He wanted her so much he shed tears that drained down those channels of moon dust, down those lonely untracked lunar valleys to the place where sadness collected on this most doleful of worlds. He cried as he had not since he was first laid on his mother’s glistening belly, a purple-faced infant. Like that babe, he could not utter the name of his beloved.
The sky opened with a rusty squeak. From beyond, light from a linen wick shone, as brilliant to his frozen pupils as the gaze of the Almighty. Three figures stood above, looking at him by lamplight, squinting as if his form offended their eyes. This mute gaping went on for some minutes, until a fourth figure appeared: smaller, more slender than the others, shining with a certain warmness that suggested she wore no clothes.
In his state of disassembly this did not seem strange to him. Nor was he surprised when she leapt into the pit in a single, pantherish bound. She was indeed naked, round limbs caressed by tendrils of light and gloom, loosed breasts casting shadows down to a maidenly tapered waist. She was regarding him with eyes half lidded, an appraising frown on her face.
Cleaved in two, some part of his brain still perceived the girl’s handsomeness. Her face was perfectly ovoid, with a high, unblemished forehead and brows plucked into neat, downy arches. Her hair was thick and shining like pistol metal in the lamplight, yet adorned with a girlish bow. The only flaw: the thin, tight mouth that seemed to ripple with tension, as when she had conversed with him at the table, eons before.
Perceiving the girl’s handsomeness, the man responded to it. Senses unspooling, dusty nostrils scraping the ground, his mouth found feminine toes mashed and tapered by years crammed in pointed boots. He could neither speak nor think, but by some convolution of mashed nerves, his sense of smell was heightened. He detected on those toes an odor he knew from the whorehouses of Dodge City, that particular combination of perfume and leather and sweat of women disrobed for pleasure. It made him want to form his lips into a gesture that should have been familiar to him but whose name was gone now, stolen. Instead, when he placed his rounded mouth on her foot, he drooled blood and spit on her toes.
“By the Lord, a pig even now!” the girl declared, voice clear but fluttering in his ears like a scream launched in the teeth of a prairie wind.
“Schnitt ihm,” someone said from above. “Jetzt.”
Shaking her foot free, she disappeared behind him. Then the stone man felt himself rising, leaving his little nest of bodily humors. Stooping, she had hold of him now, grasping him by the strip of his undamaged pate. He moaned with the exertion of being so handled. And as she pulled him higher, he felt he might speak, might produce some kind of protest, until his attention was drawn to a sharp new insult to the left point of his jaw.
They froze there together for a moment, her breath caressing his upturned forehead, the image of the girl’s face across the table. Suggesting, promising. The very prettiness of her! Caught in those lusty emanations, he forgot his meal. Her smile delivered up small, sharp, white teeth.
Just then, when he was about to make some indecent suggestion, the girl pushed the tip of the blade through his jugular and drew it across his neck like a fiddler bowing the final note of the reel. He sprayed forth, the stream spattering the walls.
The work done, she lowered him back into place with what, in his final thought, seemed great gentleness. And then he was done.