Letters to Dead Authors, #9

Dear Mr. Stoker,

My voice weakens. It seems to sink back into me, as if my body had every day more need of it, and for a program more urgent than the advertisement of my suffering. Soon I will be talking only to myself.

Maybe that is one definition of death.

I doubt it.

Speaking, I cough; coughing, I bleed; speaking is bleeding, now. I stretch my spotted handkerchiefs on embroidery frames that I label with the date and time, for future study. I can look at them for hours. To me they are eloquent.

You know, I have always been a sort of anticipatory corpse. I look back upon myself, as if from the point of view of another, later born, to whom I seem a figure out of history, oddly clad and not perfectly three-dimensional. Among other, realer people, I am an absence in a dress. So I have no doubt that I will survive my death. I have already done so.

The cat came back—thought she were a goner but the cat came back—

Just one thing bothers me. If I am no one, how can I return? If every word is a chord—if every voice is a chorus—if every self is a hole through which these ghostly voices pour—and if every ghost is an assembly of other ghosts themselves assemblies, all of them recruited in one another—then either there is no one there at all—ranks upon ranks of zeroes—or a bland Everyone without distinctions—or an impossibly ancient solitary Someone, the first being ever to speak and thus uniquely ghostless.

The cat came back, yes, but who is she? A cave Cassandra, a pedestrian fish, an ambitious alga. A nobody, a manybody, like everybody else. A name. A shell. A Trojan horse with nothing inside it.

But that nothing will open the gates.

Let us think about real horses instead, how they are hairy and great, and do not say “I,” but are there all the same, shitting where they please. Horses cannot be parted from themselves, I think, and so they have no ghosts, I think. About cats I am less sure.

If there is no self, who on earth is writing this letter? I had better end it.

But I am forgetting what I wished to say: There has been another fatality. The stupid boy ran too far with a passing remark of mine (in an address on Concrete Speech) on the subject of blood. Did he hope to please me by subtracting his tuition from the coffers, and subjecting us to impudent attentions from the law? The chief of police made himself a nuisance with his doddering inquiries and hints about chickens coming home to roost. He claims to have known my father; I told him I was sure he had, and my grandfather and no doubt great-grandfather too! Then I pretended to allow my father to say, “Hello, Tom,” and the chief pulled so odd a face I would have laughed out loud had not the black crepe drawn over the mirror reminded me that the proprieties demanded a more somber countenance.

You may be curious about the substance of my thoughts on blood. They are as follows. If every substance we emit is a form of speech, bleeding is of these the ne plus ultra—the last word—because it is so often literally the last word. In it, form and content consummate their bond, since death, source and destination of all speech, is also its eventual consequence. Furthermore, blood offers a particularly fine demonstration that all speech is haunted. Do not our fathers and our mothers consort in every clot of it? Smeared on a glass slide, it reveals to the inquisitive lens a family tree in miniature, each leaf a grinning corpuscle crying out, “Forget me not!”

I have in my reticule such a slide, which I had the foresight to prepare before the law arrived to curtail my researches. After I had put it away, I sat on a piano stool beside the corpse and listened hard, for I hoped his wounds might “ope their ruby lips,” as the Bard has it, and tell me something of interest, rather than continuing that red filibuster that had probably ruined a carpet that, though secondhand and somewhat worn, was a bona fide Persian. I heard, perhaps, a hissing, very faint. One of his thigh wounds—he had stabbed himself in numerous places: thighs, calves, forearm, groin—seemed to purse around a word, but it kept silent, it was done with speaking. I had missed the recitation.

Or had I? I put my face to it and, speaking, felt time slow and eddy around my mouth.

Unfortunately, it was at this point that the chief entered the room, leading Detective Munch (rhymes with lunch). He let out an exclamation, and I was forced to straighten up, and see the wound’s fresh-wetted lips blow a bubble to mock my hopes as time enforced its tyranny again. The chief of police cleared his throat. I believe he thought that I was attempting to drink the boy’s blood like your own Dracula! Nor did he inform me once during our interview that I had a smear of blood on my chin. Was not that unmannerly?

Your Friend,

Headmistress Joines