From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
In the city of Svalöv, in a country called Skåne. Part of Sweden now. Maybe a hundred and fifty years after Geoffroy died, a hundred and fifty years of pretty ferocious living. It had been a busy time, a terrible time of testing the parameters of the Curse, slowly piecing together the Rules. Finally, this time, I was born into circumstances that allowed me some respite. A calm after so long in a rough and bitter sea.
I was born Martin Gormsen, a noblemen birthed into a family of both measurable prestige and wealth. My disfigurement in that particular lifetime, a small and stunted left arm, the fingers smartly curled into the palm, was one I was born with.
When I was twenty years old I met Lise; we were introduced at a banquet held by Tycho Brahe, the famed financier and astronomer. Tycho, deservedly, has gone down in history as a glorious madman. The man was wonderfully nuts, downright brilliant. He was friends with my father and was one of the richest men in Europe at the time. (He’d also had the bridge of his nose sliced off in a duel with his third cousin some years before and wore a gold prosthetic at dinner parties and would on occasion bring a moose to dinner events and feed it liquor.)
Our families had done business together for many years, and perhaps sensing something strange about me, Tycho had taken a liking. I was admittedly an odd young man; a hundred and fifty years of the other shoe dropping—in the most horrific of ways—will do that to you.
To be honest, Lise had been no traditional beauty, but Jesus, neither was I. In all my lives, gender had hardly been an issue, as hard as that is to believe. I bounced between male and female throughout the years, there was a fluidity there. And really, physical relations before Lise had been rare anyway; I felt (and frequently acted) a monster, regardless if I’d been born man or woman. But with Lise we fell into it, into each other.
Oh, she was beautiful to me. Beyond our physicality, she nourished me with her kindness. She soothed me with her expanses of easy silences. She was someone I could sit next to without being reminded of the weight of my own horrors, my ravages wrought upon the world. She blessed me with the easy cadence of her love. My heart calmed when it neared her.
Her father dealt in shipping, and while well off, he was more than happy to marry his daughter into the Gormsen bloodline. We were married a year after meeting and Brahe, as a wedding gift, commissioned our portrait.
The day of the ceremony the priest intoned rites and prayers before us, and we stood on the opposite sides that tradition dictated so that my whole arm and hand should be able to hold hers. I allowed myself a sliver of hope, a glimmer of it. My mother wept to see us standing there; my father, in a rare show of emotion, put his arm around her.
If I could not tell Lise of my past, I thought at the time, this dark and calamitous secret I held, could I still not be happy? At least a little? At least this time? It seemed possible. Perhaps, I dared to think, I even deserved it. Time stretched before us: I was only twenty-one! Even with the Curse at work, we would have decades together.
I might as well have been smote right there, daring to think I deserved anything.
Lise birthed us a son within a year. Robair was born without complications, a rarity then even for families of great wealth. I can still remember Lise’s howls of pain as handmaidens and midwives gathered around her. My dear Lise, my little mouse. Where Joan had held her head high, imploring mercy from God and piety from man, Lise had held out our tiny, bloodied, bundled child to me with no less power or grace. I can still see the two of them there: Lise’s smile, her hair damp, Robair’s little bleat, his spasming fists.
I have survived for years on that image. Nourished myself from that. I have trod through unspeakable events, been buoyed by it, sustained by it.
And then came the inevitable, of course.
Every gift given with the Curse is done only so it might be taken away.
Robair, at five months old, died of influenza. Nothing creative: a rattling cough that took root in the little engine of his lungs. He had been real, I sometimes have to remind myself. This tiny boy.
Lise became wraithlike after Robair’s death. A pale, grim-socketed shadow of herself. It was understandable. It was summer when he died and golden light seemed to spill from every window and fall in swaths on the parapets. It was macabre, that sunlight, a mockery. Our home hung heavy with silence.
One morning I stepped into our chambers where Lise lay amid her quilts, moored in the canopy of our bed. Blue veins swam up her throat, the backs of her hands. I stood over her.
“You must eat,” I said. Plaintive. Begging.
The Curse, I had come to realize by then, was brilliant in its precision: I would live and live again, would feel life’s pains—or growing numbness—at every turn. But Lise, my love, had just one life, and this was what she had chosen with it. Me. Robair.
A disfigured husband and a dead child.
“We can try again,” I said, and she made a sound like an animal with a bone in its throat. She turned her face from me, covered her eyes with that blue-veined hand.
I lay next to her on the bed and laid my whole arm across her. She beneath the covers, me above.
The physician would pronounce her barren shortly hereafter. There would be no more children for us, and she would be dead anyway in less than the time it would have taken to bring another child into the world. Pneumonia.
The day after her funeral I went into a tavern in Malmö and taunted a drunken bondsman until he beat me to death.
• • •
After some indefinable time, the darkness retreated to a thin wash of pale light. I was in a bed in a room and if there was a window anywhere I couldn’t see it. The room was full of hidden machinery, though; I could hear it all chirring away, and the light, the light had to come from somewhere.
The room seemed formless save for the bed, the chair beside it. But I also saw my hand on the sheet, even the hair on my arm silvered in pinpricks of light. This was a hospital, surely. Surely.
I thought of little Mellie in the children’s ward, and her brother. How she had told me something was wrong with his little bones. Would that boy wander Smoke City someday? Was he even now trundling around the alleyways here, a little boy crafted from smoke and sorrow? Lost, looking eternally for his mother?
I turned my head to see Joan sitting in the chair next to me. Her hands were folded in her lap, her hair was shaggy and poorly cut and darkly beautiful, the color of coffee. She wore jeans and a faded red Esprit t-shirt, a brand I hadn’t heard of in years. There was even an odd pink shape on the sleeve, a bleach stain. And a white scar on her forearm shaped like an L. Such details! I tried to rise from the bed but couldn’t. She blinked her eyes in tandem with the beeping machines.
“Joan?” My voice sounded like a needle running across a record.
She smiled. Marvin.
I trembled; the breadth of my regret left me speechless. It flooded me. I gaped and she smiled and touched me on the arm. There was a moment then where I smelled flowers, lilacs, and that detail among all of them seemed the most unlikely.
Marvin? she said. Or Geoffroy? Do you have a preference?
“I don’t care. I . . . There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you.” I mewled it, tears tumbling down my whiskered cheeks from my good eye, the other socket loose and sunken, tearless. My glasses were gone.
Joan looked at me with her dark eyes. She leaned forward and put her warm hand over mine, and I felt something like a song walk up the ladder of my ribcage. A warm, wordless chorus inside me.
She held my hand and I saw a golden chain around her neck, the pendant resting there between the shallow valley of her breasts. A small figurine there.
Not a cross, or a crucifix. Not what I expected.
It was a little man!
It was a little man wearing a coat. A yellow coat.
Joan tucked her chin down and held the talisman between her fingers, looked down at it. She turned it around and there it was—a little sword on the back of it.
I said, “It’s my father’s coat.”
Joan looked at me and a sadness fell across her features like a slow and inevitable storm. She let the pendant fall against her chest and shook her head.
It’s not your father’s coat, Marvin.
“It’s not?”
You wore it as well. It’s yours.
I took my hand away. Shame burned through me. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
It’s not a dream.
“No?”
No.
She smiled sadly.
Marvin. This is your reckoning.