The Tindalos Asset

of whatever sort, tend to obliterate, to cancel, by their separate and conflicting patterns, the visibility of the details and boundaries of form, and so one thing is mistaken for another, an octopus for a handful of sand and gravel, a fish for a coral branch. A martyr for a sadist. And anyway, what difference does it make to you, how they judge the monster that you are?” I want to reply that I’m not a monster, any more than I am a sadist, but once I give the whisperer the satisfaction and validation of a reply, well, I know where that always, always leads. Better I seal my lips and keep my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the looking glass and suffer myself to silence. She tells me, “For what you’ve done, Jehosheba, they’re coming for you. For everything you’ll do. You’re being hunted again. You should have kept your head down. They thought you were done for. They thought you’d gone away, so much flotsam and jetsam dragged off with the tide. But they know better now.” I don’t respond. I’m trying to remember what day this is, what day in what year, and I’m wishing it were the day before I led the whisperer into the icy sea below Tŵr Bach lighthouse and held her head beneath the water until she stopped spitting up bubbles and there was no more breath left in her. Then I might have a little peace, just until the moment of her drowning finds me out. Before the Father and the Mother, I’m not trying to shirk my duties. I’m only trying to hear myself think. From her corner, the whisperer laughs and makes a noise like a damp mop slapped against a wall. Be still, I want to say. Be still and be quiet and let me listen to the rain. But I don’t say that or anything else. I hold a finger to my lips, and with my other hand, my left hand, I make a fist and clutch the stone become the graven image of my fate and the fate of all my lovers and the rhythm of the tides and the towers of sunken cities. “They’re coming for you,” the whisperer says again, “and they’re coming very, very soon, all the way from halfway around the world. And I will not shed a tear.” My fisted hand bleeds water, my heart’s own stigmata, the mark of Y’ha-nthlei and Our Lady of Perpetual Midnight. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” says the whisperer. “And that’s where they’re going to put you, Jehosheba, for all the things that you’ve done. There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, the tolling bell, the whine in the rigging, and that’s where you’ll sleep away the aeons, little lobster.” The water drips from my fist, the blood that is the water that is the life, and it spatters the floorboards at my feet. It spatters the lines and causeways of the maze so meticulously painted there. All the world unfolding is in that map, all this present world and all those other past and future worlds, and you only have to know how to read it. With each lover, I learned a little more. With each little life I commended to the deep, the Father and the Mother opened my eyes that much more to the glory and the wonder and the pageant of twisting, twining moments. Each life that I have taken is strung like pearls within the maze, and every drop of water from my clenched fist will become another pearl. “You’ll pay for every one of us,” the whisperer promises me. “Soon, you’ll be served your comeuppance, for all those sins and stolen lives, and they’ll call you a sadist.” Even though I have loved them all, and even though I have never taken even an instant’s pleasure in their pain. “Yes,” mutters the whisperer, “even though all that might well be true. You’ll pay. You’ll see, Jehosheba.” On the floor, the saltwater that has dripped from my hand rolls to and fro along the maze until it arrives at the moment past when I drowned the whisperer, and it lingers there, while I’m dragging her naked, sodden, limp body from the bay and up onto the rocks again. Above us, the foghorn bleats and just offshore a bell buoy clangs its meaningless answers. The stars wheel overhead, a hurricane of pinpricks in the dome of Heaven, and I take great care not to look up. I shiver, bite my bleeding lips, and I do my work, putting it all in motion, so that one day I will sit here in this room before this mirror, so that one day I shall paint a maze upon the floor of this room, so that one day I will place an inconstant, loveless Jonah in the belly of a great fucking fish, so that all will be revealed in the fullness of time and the abyss. There on the rocks beneath Tŵr Bach, I kissed the whisperer’s dead lips. I laid a small white sand dollar on her forehead. I covered each nipple with a limpet, and I arranged a wheel of whelks and periwinkles and marsh snails on her belly. I hid her sex with a kindly handful of knotted wrack. I did exactly as I had been instructed. And down in the sea a million upturned eyes shone their approval. I left her there for the crabs and the gulls and the maggots. I left her there for the tide to drag away to the hungry children of the Mother and the Father. Within the maze on the floor at my feet, drops of water from my hand roll away from that night to other nights and other sacrifices, and each of them I loved as much as I’d loved the whisperer in her turn. I sit in my chair, and I kneel on