things were meant to work out. Whatever he had felt for Mary — and, really, he wasn’t certain what that had been, only that it had been everything for him — he chalked up to the fires of youth, which he told himself were behind him. I think he was encouraged to feel this way, to belittle everything that had happened between him and Mary; time healed all wounds, everyone knew that!
What Eddie didn’t take into account was the fact that while time did, indeed, heal all wounds, it was also the source of them — a fact the sorcerer Body-without-Soul was only too well aware of. It was the sorcerer’s ambition to get rid of time altogether, and in so doing to make everything in the world duplicate his own grotesque condition. For what granted the body its relation to time but the soul, the ageless, deathless soul — without the soul the lump of flesh that was the body would just sit there forever like the lump it was, unable to understand or feel a thing.
Eddie turned out to be a portrait artist of uncommon skill, his ability to capture the essence of a subject so uncanny he earned commissions from some from the city’s most prominent citizens. He painted the newly appointed bishop with his gold mitre and ivory teeth; he painted the mayor’s bony wife with her chubby daughter. In each case he was able to convey an almost painfully accurate representation of the subject’s external appearance while at the same time laying bare what would otherwise remain occult, the bishop’s unrequited love for his own handsome face, the daughter’s delight at being the cause of her mother’s embarrassment.
It wasn’t long before Eddie could afford a studio of his own in a fashionable neighborhood. Initially society’s darling, as the years passed he also became the object of serious critical attention. There were shows at the major galleries, articles in the best journals, adulatory monographs, even a coffee-table-sized book. For a while he was married to one of his patronesses; he had his share of love affairs as well. Then one evening he got the call that changed everything. “I have a job for you,” said the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, disguising his voice to sound human. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
The next day when Eddie entered his studio he found that a woman had let herself in and was standing on the dais with her back to him. She was wearing an organdy gown of a pinkness so pale as to be practically white, tied at the waist with a deep pink sash. On her head she wore a bonnet, its long pink streamers hanging loose to her shoulders, which were bare. She was the image of Pinkie, the girl on Mary’s trading card, though unlike the woman in his studio, Pinkie would never have been caught dead with a cigarette. The woman glanced to one side. “Eddie,” she said, exhaling smoke. “Darling.” He got the fleetest glimpse of a single eye, refracting light and silver like mirror backing.
But if this was Mary, why was the yellow cat hissing at her, its back arched in a parody of feline anger? The woman looked no older than Mary had the last time Eddie had seen her, whereas he, Eddie, was losing his hair and needed glasses to read the paper, and the yellow cat had long surpassed one hundred in human years. The studio was overheated, the water banging in the radiators, the smell of turpentine and cigarette smoke overpowering. There had been some scandal, Eddie remembered, following which Mary had moved to the city. As he watched, she began removing her clothes. Her skin was that shade of milky white that’s almost blue, like skim rather than whole milk, her hair a tumble of curls. Before she had a chance to turn to face him, he had bolted from the room, together with the shoe box and the cat.
Now he could no longer stand the sight of living flesh. For a while he drew the cadavers the hospital supplied for the use of the medical students; he had been told there was money to be made illustrating anatomy textbooks and this proved to be true. Later he preferred to find his subjects at the city morgue, where he was befriended by the coroner, a heavyset man with the drooping jowls of a hound and a long gray ponytail. When Eddie asked him the difference between a cadaver and a corpse, the man pointed to a recent arrival by way of reply. The bodies that came into the morgue were not always in such good shape, corpses — as opposed to cadavers — often having met a violent end. But Eddie could draw anything. “You’re so good you can draw blood,” the coroner liked to say, and then he would howl with laughter.
I suppose it’s not surprising that eventually someone Eddie knew would show up there. He was sitting alone eating a sandwich, his drawing pad open on his knees, and had just started sketching.
“Remember me?” asked the corpse.
It was Miss Vicks lying on the marble slab, flat and pale as a flounder. “Listen to me, Edward,” said Miss Vicks. “You’ve always been good at following directions. Do you still have that knife I gave you?” She asked him to cut her up in pieces the way he’d cut up the hare. When Miss Vicks spoke her mouth opened and closed like a small live entity all its own.
“Why should I do that?” Eddie asked, and he began to grow dizzy thinking of where the time went and how there wasn’t that much of it left. “Besides,” he said, “the last time I followed your directions I don’t remember things going particularly well.” Over the years he had grown so used to talking to the yellow cat he didn’t find it that strange to be talking to a corpse.
“What on earth do you mean, Edward?” Miss Vicks asked. “It was Mary who didn’t fold the paper the way I said, not you. Hurry up, please!” she added, flecks of spit appearing on her lips. “What’s taking you so long?”
At some point rain had started falling, long strings of it from a sky the color of tin, pieces of which kept breaking loose and landing on the morgue roof, piling up there like the pieces of time in the case of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway.
Eddie felt so dizzy, he hardly knew what he was doing. He took the knife from where he kept it in the shoe box. He cut off Miss Vicks’s hands and feet and cut out her entrails and was just cutting off her head when he heard a tiny voice coming from his sandwich.
“Eddie,” the voice said. “Don’t listen to her. It’s a trap.”
Eddie looked down and saw an ant emerging from between the two slices of bread, the very same ant he’d saved so many years ago from starving. What Eddie had to do, the ant told him, was to hold onto the leg it had given him back then — did he remember? Eddie had put it in his shoe box. By holding onto its leg, the ant told Eddie, he would become an ant so small no one could see him, even with a magnifying glass. And indeed the second Eddie picked the leg up he found himself standing on the sandwich, the other ant at his side, as enormous as an elephant, its magnificent abdomen gleaming like patent leather.
“What do we do now?” Eddie asked.
“We wait and watch and listen,” the ant replied.
When the coroner arrived at the morgue to find parts of Miss Vicks strewn across the slab, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Oh, Eddie,” the coroner sighed. “How could you do this to me?” Clearly it was a case for the police. In no time at all Body-without-Soul had sped to the scene in his silver-gray car. “Tell me you haven’t touched anything,” he said to the coroner. “We’ll dust for prints,” he added, snatching Eddie’s drawing without first bothering to put on his latex gloves. “You might as well go home,” he told the coroner. But the minute the man was gone Body-without-Soul tore the drawing to bits. “They’ll never get me,” he said. “Most human beings are too stupid and sentimental and the only one who isn’t I took care of years ago.” Of course Miss Vicks knew he meant Mary. Precious Mary, as Miss Vicks thought of her, sourly.
Human beings would never be able to kill him, the sorcerer went on to say, because to do that would require tracking down his soul, which was hidden somewhere on the Poole estate in a black egg. A black egg in a black craw in a black heart in a black stomach. Someone was going to need the right tools — a bunch of body parts, he added, a trifle sadistically thought Miss Vicks — without which they’d never be able to make all the transformations needed to slit open the belly of the cat that ate the dog that ate the crow and find the egg that his soul would fly out of when you cracked its shell open. “Blah blah blah,” said Body-without-Soul. “The usual song and dance. It’s not going to happen.”
Miss Vicks moved her mouth as if to answer. Nothing came out at first but a trickle of sound like tap water and then her hands balled into fists and the sound grew louder, churning and grinding and clicking like stones borne on the flood.
I think it’s harder to return to the place where you lived your life when you were a child than it is to change from a man to an ant and back again. Eddie couldn’t stop looking at his human arms and legs, wondering what had become of those six graceful appendages he’d come to prefer to his own, each one as translucent as amber and delicately feathered.
The street where he used to play baseball was jammed on both sides with parked cars, making the idea of playing anything there, even if he’d still been able to, impossible, and the sycamore trees, having first grown so immense that huge holes had been cut in their crowns to make room for telephone lines and electric wire, in the
