Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Just how long has it been since you ate something?”

The sight of Shatrina Carter standing perspiring in this funky ruined-ass apartment strikes me as so novel that I can’t help but stare. Actually I think she was here last week. Or maybe it was last month. That would depend a little on what month this is.

“Did you even hear me?” asks Tree. “I just spoke to you.”

Tree just spoke to me, but “Suzanne” has started up again and I want to listen to the words. The American Teacher’s Computer, I’ve recently learned, will repeat a single song more or less forever if you ask it to. Now each time that nasal whiskey-edged tenor returns to this stark reptilian space, to my horseless and monthless latitudes, I am pinioned once more against an iridescent landscape of sea-foam and seraphim bones. At last I’ve heard these verses for the first time. And the first time. And the first time.

Dr. Carter has bored of our conversation. She now harrumphs in the kitchen, which I admit needs a little work. My left hand reaches for a nearby pair of khakis to cover the charred hole in the American Teacher’s Mattress. Now the hand returns to its customary office of cradling the right wrist, which feels appallingly naked without its customary plaster cast. They wouldn’t let me keep it a day longer. Now my eyes re-visit the honey jar on the settee table. Something is unfinished.

“Lord have mercy,” says Tree from the kitchen.

I hear sirens. Beneath the high arcs of their wails, Leonard Whisper Boy creeps in once more, minor-ing the key and dropping the register to just above the glazed ceramic tiles where the heavy gases accrue, there to rot the grout and distort space/time, syncline and anticline beginning somewhere near the dresser and heading irrevocably this way. I’ve no idea what will happen when that vector achieves the spot whereon I lie each hour of day and most moments of night, awaiting the singularity that dots the eye of the tigress.

It stalks me, that singularity. But by painfully slow degrees.

Tree returns to the front room where the kiddie art is half-fallen from the walls and I am fully fallen from grace, it would seem.

Gravelly laughter. She tosses her long hair behind her shoulders. Do you want to know what’s really true?

As I watch, Tree clears off a settee chair and kicks aside the clutter until she can place the chair opposite my spot on the mattress. Now she tries to wedge herself into the chair, turning a little sideways. This doesn’t seem to please her very much. But I don’t think much of anything here does. At least the burnt plastic smell is gone. I returned from Studebaker Supermarket to find the apartment filled with acrid black smoke. I threw open the windows and poured a pan of water onto the corner of the smoldering mattress, a place where nothing at all had been, as far as I could recall. Still, a charred hole penetrated Lillian’s fitted sheet and mattress cover and continued all the way through the foam mattress. Whatever had melted down hadn’t stopped before charring the floor tiles, leaving a permanent stain. The tarry deposit provided no clue as to what had generated such heat, but some days later one item did turn up missing. The moment that something came to mind, I knew exactly where I’d last seen it. That very spot at the corner of the mattress. The Barbie deck.

Ken’s mad.

“Lillian tells me that you aren’t taking your medication,” announces Tree. “Are you, or are you not?”

I gaze at her.

“Why are you not?” says Tree. “It came in the mail. What happened to it?”

I try to answer but my voice isn’t quite working. I clear my throat. I clear it again, more forcefully. Finally I croak, “How’s Lil?”

“Worried sick. The school called her and said you aren’t coming to class anymore or even leaving the apartment. They said you aren’t eating. I came here to cook something and give you your medication. Where is it?”

I pretend to be considering a reply. In a moment perhaps I’ll know what this woman is talking about. The part about not going to class is definitely untrue. I go at least once a week. Anyway, it averages once a week.

“I didn’t climb those stairs to talk sweet with you,” growls Tree. “Where is your medication?”

“Verse three,” I whisper hoarsely.

It’s all in verse three.

We tried to tame the madwoman, you and I, and thought we had, only to find that beneath the cover of night she’d molted, spawned, come swarming back with tendrils aswirl to swallow civilizations like the jungles of Yucatan at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour just before we’d succeeded in laminating facsimiles of ourselves to the living room furniture and mailing our fingers to the Bureau of Records.

I think we fear only two things, you and I. Being dead and being alive. The closer we get to either, the more attractive the other starts to seem. In truth, we don’t like either one very much. You and I.

We left no forwarding address when we disappeared into the night with these terrible dreamers, wrapped in our cloaks of regret and secret oaths to forest nymphs. Whispered and re-whispered in leaf beds of humid and perilous screwing beneath the watching sky. We thought we would arrive somewhere and mythologize our journey, rear strong-boned children who’d help in the fields and become complacent with fire. But something had already shifted beneath our feet, the deer trails become rabbit trails then ant trails. And then the ants were following us, hoping we knew where the grasshopper lay dying and which curled leaf held morning’s final teardrop. And following behind the ants were the rabbit and the deer.

We disappear again into that forest each time we sleep, hurl ourselves once more into that darkness that promised so much, there to dream all of this into possibility that we may again awake as something recognizable, utter words that others may distinguish, eat for breakfast what we couldn’t finish at dinner, and scheme to forget what we have suffered so hard to learn.

I don’t know how long I can stand to look at these things.

I am hearing sirens, the melancholy two-tone kind from old European films. There seem to be three of them, one a bit flat, almost major-seventh-ing the others. They issue from different directions, their vectors seeming to cross very near this very mattress.

“What are you growing in here?” asks Tree’s voice. Someone’s in the kitchen with the ‘shroom farm. Someone’s in the kitchen I know.

“My lorr-rrd?” sings Tree.

Could be it’s time for the other sandal to fall. To finally bring the other side of the equation, the part that doesn’t add up but does multiply. That lives somehow despite every death sentence and failed appeal, that even now delivers fresh messages from the fallow field from which blow the seeds of all possibility and the dreaded spores of gnosis. Which is why Leonard Whisper Boy reaps so grimly, his little worm-words eating into both sides of the brain, serving up the horrific alongside the celestial and saying all of this is what you are.

All of this is what we are.

Tree returns to stand before me, her hands filled with spent packages of ma huang gathered from the floor. Her eyes hold accusation.

“This is your new health-food diet? Mushrooms and ma huang?”

“Very low in fat,” I croak.

It’s a good thing I just carried out the gin bottles.

Tree opens her hands. The plastic wrappers fall to the floor. She stares at me for another moment before placing most of herself in the settee chair. As she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, a crease appears at the center of her forehead.

I think I slept for an hour or so around dawn, awakening with what seemed perfect continuity of thought, though recalling the thoughts themselves proved problematic. The mushroom tends to come in waves. I never know when another swell may appear to suck me down and drag me along the gritty sand at the ocean bottom. My eyes return to the honey jar, nearly empty. Something is unfinished.

Tree begins another deep breath, and I watch her body swell. The crease in her forehead begins to fade, and I wonder whether the sabbatical to the mountain worked for her.

I deleted the novel last night. And told Ahmed Massoud Monzur to burn his copy.

Tree draws another deep breath, and I wait. The suspense is difficult to bear. Soon her eyes will roll open and precisely chosen words will nail these wrists and feet to a mattress in dire need of sweeping, its charred hole beneath a dirty pair of pants. But what day is without its dilemma, what dilemma without its day?

Tree’s eyes open. Her voice is calm. “Julian. Your mother has been in a coma for three months. Your sister is fighting a court battle over the living will. She was just arrested at a peace demonstration, and it was… messy. There’s talk of having her disbarred. This SARS thing is totally out of control—they’re quarantining whole airline flights—and now Lillian gets a phone call from Shenzhen saying her brother has flipped out. I told her I’d come and check on the situation. So I come here. And this is what I find.”

My eyes roll closed in shame.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” continues Tree impassively, “but I know what’s going on with Lillian, and she needs to remain exactly where she is. What can I do to help you?”

I resist my body’s urge to draw in, to curl forward and swallow its own tail, to disappear in the face of this unbearable love. The last time I attended classes, I was overwhelmed by it. I’d never seen it before. Never felt it. Now I was threading bewildered through it, clipboard and water bottle in hand, stairwells swarming, face after face exploding with HULLO, HOW AHHH YOU, WHAT ZAHHHP and MAHNSUHH-HHHH, so lost in it, spun around in it, so painfully naked and womb-wrapped in it, no longer apart but a part somehow, and how now to harbor this private sorrow, this…

Annihilation.

The last time I found myself roiling within that slow-mo sea of white-over-blues, their eyeglasses crooked, tits too small and sideburns that won’t grow, all of them utterly futureless and every last one of them too fucking stupid to not love, I found myself half-buckled over, groping for an exit, a source of air, a means to behold something anything but this lingering simpering image of someone somewhere helplessly transfigured.

I’d feared that losing Ana’s love would kill me.

Losing love doesn’t kill you. Receiving love kills you.

The sirens have stopped. I hear shouts. Tree is no longer here. I am alone, curled on the mattress, cradling my shriveled and too-naked arm. It’s another incoming wave. I try to dig deeper into the mattress. I think I know something, and I’ll tell you what it is. Either we die completely each moment, or we live a slow death while someone somewhere else carries the note. Maybe Tree’s right. Maybe they summoned us here. The poker-playing fuck-tragic juvenile delinquents of this country. The fifth-floor boys with the biceps and the stare. The going-nowhere girls asleep on their own forearms. This whole doomed generation of too many, too little, too late, too yellow, too bad. A half-billion voices raised in clueless silence, and no one listening.

The metal door opens and slams. Busy footsteps disappear into the kitchen. Boisterous sounds. Lots of clanging. “Suzanne” returns, its background singers caked in mascara, their little puffs of song naively hoping to convince us that they occupy the same time-space continuum as the grave, dark man-whisper they attempt to ornament. Now comes the preposterous and defining stroke, the splaying of Brer Yeshua, not between two thieves but between two verses concerning a crazy rag-picker, hitting the same anomaly at a different octave and birthing a vision that towers even as it sags in surrender. Whispered into the right brain are weird yet instantly recognizable evolutionary code. Rabbi, rabble-rouser, messiah, martyr. We slip these garments over his head time and again, only to discover that he’s escaped through the arm hole and wandered again, barefoot and breathing, into the subcontinent to dream worlds into existence where phantasmagoric creatures rut in moonlit meadows and thirsty scrolls open themselves like the soft hands of a child, stealing into the municipal limits by night to send his snakes into our hearts, destroying our families’ hopes for us, sewing shut our futures with cotton twine and a thorn. He plummets so deep that he comes out the other side where all is reversed and his face Issis’s, his body Gaia’s, his thoughts Sophia’s, and all else, all else, the singularity he must now and forever cling to.

Trembling.

I’d give anything for two hours of sleep.

In the end, the patient little mushrooms ate his perfect body—but not before he had tasted theirs. Did I say that out loud? All of this is what you are. All of this, too-yellow children, is what you are.

“Julian.”

My eyes are so dry they make a grinding sound as they open. Tree is half-sitting in the settee chair. “How do you feel, baby?” she asks. I whisper that I feel a little weak, and she nods.

“I’m making a big vegetable soup,” says Tree. “And there’s a bowl of fruit on the counter. May I slice some up for you now?”

I gaze at her blankly.

“May I slice some up for you now?” says Tree.

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

“Because the moon,” I whisper.

“Julian. Look at me. Why won’t you eat something?”

“I don’t know. Something’s turned wrong, Tree. Something is incomplete.”

My voice quavered when I said that.

Tree’s brown eyes confer with mine for a moment and then another moment. Now she looks away. “I’m not cleaning this place up for you. You’re going to get up and do it yourself. The way you’re going to get up and do it yourself is by eating the fruit I slice up and then eating a little of that soup. And then you’re going to take a hot shower and get a good night’s sleep.”

The soft brown eyes return to my face. “I flushed those mushrooms down the toilet. And if you so much as look at another package of that ma huang… It’s Saturday. You’re teaching Monday morning. In clean clothes. I’ll think of something to say to your—”

Tree pauses and closes her eyes. “Somebody’s probing us,” she says. “Do you feel it?”

I blink.

“How long since you’ve cleared and sealed this space?” asks Tree.

“I haven’t, umm, exactly…”

“No wonder you can’t sleep,” she says, using her arms to push herself up from the chair.

Moving slowly, scanning with the palms of her hands, Tree picks her way through the debris-strewn room, pausing here and there to draw symbols in the air with her fingers, chanting words I can’t quite hear. Now she claps her hands three times and spreads her arms. “Lord God,” she whispers.

“What?”

Tree doesn’t answer. Too exhausted to follow the thread any farther, I let my eyelids fall.

“Lord God,” mutters Tree, but he’s no longer listening. Another wave has come raging in, opening beneath him a space through which he tumbles, spiraling down like a dry leaf, brittle and succumbing. He is a single point of awareness in a vast, cold space, surrounded by silent satellites that orbit obediently, each rotating slowly as it draws near. He sees that the surrounding satellites are rectangular boxes, each bearing a naked woman posed artfully, each curve illuminated by a sunless light. He focuses on one woman, her face freckled and familiar, her silent lips accusing.

I know her. She is a tight rosebud of sixteen. First love. First offense. She is cold and vanishingly thin as though methodically starved, her two brown irises enormous, wan and unfocused. Unwilling to gaze at her a moment longer, I look away only to discover another face I know too well, another young woman. And another. Is it possible that every woman of my tragic and loveless love life circles yet, perishes yet in these interstellar depths, their eyes bearing the same injury that long ago should have dried and hardened? Trying once more to turn away, I discover that I am surrounded by not one circle of satellites, but countless concentric circles of rotating boxes displaying cold and undernourished women, each orbiting as though around a sightless sun. Weakly I strain to see the farthest circle, but they reach to infinity and beyond, the numberless women, the innumerable generations, all spinning pointlessly in the cold vacuum of periodic lust and undying indifference.

I want to pull in, to swallow my own tail. I am no sun, no source of light nor warmth but only a singularity of self, sucking what remains of each bone, each woman in turn, sucking their still humid marrow until there is none. I want to turn away but there is no direction of escape. I try to close my eyes but they are already closed. I try to open them but they are already open. Again in front of me is the same freckled face, first love, first offense. Helpless, I watch her features morph into those of the girlfriend who shortly replaced her. Now she is the college coed who sold her Volkswagen to pay for an abortion. Now she is my first wife. Then my first lover on the side. My second lover on the side. Third. I long to turn away, but the two eyes hold me in place as they change their color and shape again and yet again, fragile faces forming and re-forming until I no longer know whom I look upon and whom I do not. And now I know that it doesn’t matter.

The same blood pulses through each one.

Suddenly I am startled to encounter the face of my own mother as a young woman, her cheeks high and firm, her green eyes bright with promise. Those eyes arrest me. They ask me whether they are different from the eyes of all the others. As quickly as the question registers, the features surrounding the emerald eyes morph until I am looking into the face of my sister, astonished at her beauty. Now one of the eyes changes, and my breath stops. Glistening before me are blue and green irises I know quite well.

Her lips begin to move.

“We are each the same woman, Julian. Each a failed mother. A failed sister. A failed lover. Each a pair of hands that have touched you with imperfect love. Each a beating heart that came close enough for you to feel and to hold and to harm. And we’re more than that. We are no mere extensions of your want.”

Ana’s gaze holds mine for a long, punishing moment. Gradually the colors of her irises darken to two pools of gold-spattered umber, and it is Shatrina Carter’s face that looms before mine. “Say this after me,” she says. “I call upon the Masters of Light…”

I struggle to understand.

“I call upon the Masters of Light… ,” she repeats.

“Tree?” I say, voice trembling.

“Do it,” she says.

“I can’t, Tree.”

Her hand touches mine. “I call upon the Masters of Light… ,” she says softly.

My eyes roll closed in surrender. “I call upon the Masters of Light…”

“And Archangels Michael and Gabriel,” Tree continues, and my voice trails childishly behind, “to assist in clearing away now and forevermore any and all alliances contracts and agreements, accords unions and fraternities, bonds links and attachments, that do not serve my highest good. These I do hereby negate cancel and rescind, dispatch destroy and disambiguate, in all times places dimensions and universes. I hereby release unto their truest destinies all whom I have enslaved usurped or detained, affronted offended foisted or forgotten. With deepest humility and thanks, I send any and all, each and every, to their warmest and safest harbors of rest regeneration and refuge, all praise Aphrodite Almighty, be it hereby and forevermore so.”

“. . . hereby and forevermore so,” I warble.

Tree’s gaze pierces me.

“I heard you say something about the beloved Master Yeshua Ben Joseph,” she says firmly. “Now I’m going to tell you something. There was a gap between the Father and the Son. Yeshua felt this gap, and it hurt his soul very deeply. He knew that he must refuse to be either Father or Son as long as either came at the expense of the other. So Yeshua went into the desert. It took him forty terrible days and nights, but he found an answer. He was the answer. He became the principle of unification, the third element that mediated Father and Son. He became something that had never been because someone had to do it, and once he knew that, it became his responsibility.”

Tree doesn’t blink.

“Yeshua became the Holy Spirit because someone had to. Someone had to bring in the solution, and that’s why you and I are here, Julian. That’s why we have gone to all this trouble. It’s why I have agreed to be this—ridiculous creature. It’s why you have agreed to occupy this terrible moment of trial.”

Tree looks away. When her eyes return, they are soft with pity. “Jules? Are you hearing me? Are you taking any of this in?”

I nod weakly.

“There’s a lot I could tell you about what Mr. Xu and I learned up on that mountain,” she says. “A lot, Julian. You aren’t ready.”

I watch Tree pull herself erect.

“You know what Xu means?” she asks. “It means allow. That’s Taoism and that’s Mr. Xu. The fruit’s in the fridge inside a plastic bowl. Listen, I don’t know who you made mad, but there was some very strange energy up inside this place tonight. I kept seeing the image of a minotaur with a woman’s body. You know anything about a female minotaur?”

Someone shakes his head.

“I did what I could. I left a little stone in each corner of the room. Don’t move them. They’re holding the shield in place. Now…”

She gazes at me tenderly. “May I bring you your medication?”

“I threw it away.”

Her gaze doesn’t flicker. “You threw it away.”

After a moment, Tree sighs. “I have to trust that you know what you’re doing, Julian. That’s all anyone can do now. You’re in the birth canal. What happens now, happens. God bless you and God bless you. And may God bless you.”

Tree limps slightly as she walks to pick up her purse. “Eat something and go to bed.”

“I love you, Tree.”

She turns to look at me, surprised.

I watch her open the American Teacher’s Door. The scent of rain enters the room. “And do something about this mess.”

The door closes behind Shatrina Carter. I am alone with what must be done.

With a mighty effort, I reach up to the settee table and take hold of the honey jar. Falling back against Lil’s folded pillow to catch my breath, I wonder if Tree was really here. I no longer smell the rain. Returning my attention to the jar, I remove its lid and look inside. The earthy scent of chrysanthemum honey fills my nostrils. The jar is almost empty, but enough honey remains to gloss the obscene ochre edges of one very large and very menacing mushroom.