14. The Final Dispatch, contd.

Well, here we are again in my office. It looks real—I get up close to the wood paneling to check the grain and there is no blurring or repetition. An exclamation mark of bird muck streaks one windowpane, dotted by a blob on the sill. Bottle of paregoric, stuffed gray parrot, ventriloquist’s dummy.

A little test, that, I was just trying to trick myself, to see what I’d swallow. No, there’s no dummy here. Except Miss Exiguous. Mr. Mallow. And Mother Other: Puppets, props, automata, the lot of them. The girl, though, is surely real. She does not, perhaps, look the way I have her looking—part crow, part spider, in her black untidy hitched-up too-short dress, holey black tights, with her skinny legs and arms of which she seems to have a few too many. But inside that form is a living soul. I believe it beyond reason.

Why do I not then seize her and fetch her home? But I myself am seized, the key in my back is turning, click click click, da da da [singing], the scene must take its course. She opens her mouth. I know what I will hear, and yet I tremble.

“Hello again, my dear.”

My father’s voice is strange in such a mouth. One knows instinctively that such a voice, a man’s voice, cannot have its origins in a little girl’s chest cavity. No matter how good a mimic she may be. Not because it is so deep, my father’s voice is actually quite high, one might say feminine. It is something else in it—a flat cold killing rage imperfectly disguised as reason. Only I, when I was a girl, might have had such a voice.

“Why use the girl?” I said.

“Think of her as a telephone.”

“Perhaps she would prefer to be a person.”

“Perhaps I would prefer to be a person as well,” said my father, “but I no longer have that privilege.”

“You forfeited it,” I said, but automatically. For some time I have had the feeling that I had overlooked something, and I had just figured out what it was.

I had always believed that the dead were helpless to shape their world for us, since they do not have the time, literally, to create a temporal fiction. But now it struck me (and here, when a thought strikes you, it can bloody your nose) that if living people who were channeling the voices of the dead came here, those voices could probably speak (continue speaking) just as ours do, and with the same effect. In this way I might find myself in a world that my father, speaking through Finster, had made for me, and not knowing it, never discover the way out, but trudge dutifully after him down this hard dirt road forever.

Ahead of me, polished heels, firmly subduing the dust in monotonous alternation.

Sun stinging my nape.

I am seven and my father is telling me the world. How high his degree; how lower the townsfolk’s; how lower still my mother’s. How she degraded his seed in promoting her own. How I thrust myself upon him through her offices, springing up where unlooked for, spilling toward him out of a dark place, eft, emmet, elver, and reaching for him, despite his very natural feelings of aversion, probably drawn to the Apollonian splendor of his countenance (I can’t say I remember it), as all low things are drawn to the high, moth to the flame, mother to father, Caliban, Icarus, et cetera; how, though one should not expect cuddles from Mithras, I might study to deserve the light of understanding that his presence would shed on the world of phenomena; how if I could overcome my constitutional indolence enough to apply myself to his therapies, I might even contrive to be one day a little less disgusting in his eyes.

He instructs me further and I believe him that chloride of lime combats noxious effluvia and that teak is superior to oak for ship timber, that oxalates have the property of decomposing calcareous silts and the prudent man will not partake of port after a meal of oysters, that fornication is an abomination whose punishment is childbirth, that the character of the yellow man is contemplative, that speaking the French language gives a pleasing shape to the mouth, that on repeated bathing with diluted sulfuric acid the skin will resist the action of fire, that a Monsieur Bon had excellent gloves and stockings made of spider’s silk, that the efficacy of fomentation in promoting the suppuration of boils cannot be doubted . . . 

He curses, cuffs a horsefly from his neck. I smile into my collar.

His shoes impressing the dust with coffin shapes. My own leaving smaller coffins behind.

How oddly comfortable I feel with you. Is this, dear listener, what you would call a friendship? I wish—

In a certain kind of story, you would turn out to be related to the kindly neighbor who watched over me after my parents died (actually she was a suspicious and penny-pinching widow), or would wind up possessed by my mother’s gentle spirit and spread beneficence over my tortured soul like treacle. In another kind of story, not so different really, you would be my nemesis. But I hope I know better than to fall for such devices.

For that is another influence to watch out for: the literary. One of my pulpitasters (for I am a sort of pulpit)—one of the stamens thrilling in my perianth—one of the freshets freshening in my sails—or, in plain English, one of the ghosts I channel—is the author Jephra Meant. You will not have heard of her, though she would not believe it. Her fame, such as it was, flowered, wilted, and withered at the turn of the last century. It is pressed in a book or two: slim volumes with marbled deckles, containing essays, a few poems, some peculiar stories in which very little happens, very ornately. You can still find them in the odd antiquarian bookshop at prices not exorbitant. A testy, bombastic old bat, half mad, nurtured on the learned wit of the eighteenth century, Jephra spent the latter half of her life planning the novel to end all novels, but fell ill before she could put down more than a few thousand words. Her ghost pesters me (and others through me) to find those papers, surely by now crumbling into curry-colored dust. Lately I have been feeling her buck and bridle when I speak, hurling her weight behind this word or that one, weirding a workaday phrase with a whiff of hippogriff. (Pulpitasters, freshets, hers. Hippogriff, hers.) These writers make the most persistent ghosts! She would like, I know, to write her own too-long-deferred novel through me, and she smells the ink on my breath, hears the rattle of the typewriter in my tonsils.

But I defy her deathbeds, her skull-headed ladies, her angelic infants and inheritances. You are neither nemesis nor ministering angel. You are what you seem: a good listener.

What am I, too, but a listener. Yes, you are quite right (I can see your mouth, slightly twisted, your eyes, reservedly amused, and I know very well what you are thinking), I am a loud sort of listener. But a listener.

Right now I am listening to my mother hum. I loll at her feet in the grass. Am I a baby, then, or just groveling? I have lifted the hem of her skirt and uncovered the scandal of bare feet. The oddly waxy sheen of her little crumpled toes. A few dark hairs curling on the crown of the arch. Matching blisters on the littlest toes of each foot catch the light so that they seem to glow: pale amber cabochons. Through her straw bonnet confetti of light scatters over cheekbones, collarbone. A noise, someone coming, she turns her head so that the points of light swing across her chest. Simultaneously pulling her feet back under her gown.

When I look up, I have forgotten where I am.

It is Cheesehill, but it isn’t. The sky clings moistly to the land, the land swells sweetly against the sky (only I disturb their commerce), the horizon is closed tight, but I open my mouth and it parts.

A long eye, all pupil, regards the eye that I am.

Gasp of an outbreath [static]. Cinders spinning in a still wind [static]. I nearly wet myself, my dead, I mean, my dear, before I realize—no, I realize nothing, and make the mistake of saying it, I mean nothing, saying nothing [static, audio break, popping]. Black shafts of light slam down through a thundering silence, and I am choking on a glass apple of air. I close my eyes, because the sky has hardened against my face, locked around my legs, thrust up under my arms. When I can I force apart my eyelids my own lashes frighten me, scything at the top and bottom of the world, and the lash-like leaves of the nasty trees that grow here are impudently accurate; must every single one be different? Ugh, ugh! The revulsion concentrates itself in the back of my neck as a feeling of sudden disbelief directed mostly downward: I seem to be a severed head sewn onto a cardboard cutout of a body. Aghast, I command my hands to rise, rip out the clumsy stitches, but my cardboard body does not move, I am trapped, in this head, anyone would be upset, and I’m upset, and nauseated, I feel my gorge rise, and that’s my salvation, my body takes on mass, the dimensions unfold obediently into space, the glass apple collapses into a pulpous mass I spit out, and I say my moth, I mean my mouth, I mean my mother, doesn’t matter, I say something, and so I am something, again, provisionally speaking, provided I’m speaking.