sharp limestone at the edge of Bae Malltraeth and drift in utter darkness twenty-one hundred fathoms down. Sitting in my chair before the looking glass, sinking through hadopelagic depths that have never been insulted and bruised by the scalding insult of the sun, feeding the maze, I am shown everything that has been and all that is still to come. I have opened so many doors, doors within myself and doors in the fabric of creation. I am ushering in the flood. I am waking the Sleeper in His ancient sepulcher. A swarm of trilobites and viperfish weave a holy shroud about me. In her corner, the whisperer reminds me what a fool I am, like every other saint who ever lived. I wish I knew the words to banish her. I wish I knew that spell. But even she has a part to play, like the irritating grain of sand to worry the oyster to grow the pearls that spill from my hand to roll along the pathways of a maze painted on a floor in a cottage by the sea. The whisperer says, “You should have killed her when you had the chance, my own and gentle salmon. Like you undid me, you should have undone her, made of her only a torn seine, a shattered lobsterpot, a broken oar. Was she really so much more beautiful? Did you really love her so much more?” And I almost reply. I go so far as to open my mouth, and I very nearly speak the words—I would show you the whole of it, if I were but allowed to do that. Then you’d see. There’s a wing on the fly on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea, and I would show you all of it, my love, and then you’d know your death was not in vain. I would show you the drowned lands rising above the waves, and I would show you all the dry lands sinking into the vault of the sea. I would show you the stations of my cross. I would not be so alone, if you could see it, too. The whisperer laughs as if she’s read my mind and isn’t buying any of it. Not one whit. I open my hand and look down at the stone carving, the graven image of the Mother. The whisperer is threatening to set all my ghosts free, but I know that she’d have done that by now, if she were capable of such a thing. The whisperer laughs and makes a slithering sound. I drift deeper, and the stone in my hand glows like the bioluminescent lure of an anglerfish, light for my eyes only, light that owes nothing to the sun, light born of chemosynthesis and hydrothermal vents. I sink, and the one whom I could not kill rises from an asphalt runway to sail among the clouds. She stinks of the poppy’s venom in her blood. She stinks of incremental, sour deaths. Nothing is happening that I have not set in motion. All of this was planned. If I were a sadist, I would say these things aloud and with these truths taunt the whisperer who taunts me. I would torture the whisperer and take some small relief from the necessary masochism of my every act. Instead, I clench my hand tightly around the stone again, and around me and within me the grey room fills up with the absolute stillness of a hole in the bottom of the sea, and the pressure of a thousand atmospheres would crush me flat, were it not for the invisible fist clenched about me.
6.: The Lady and the Tiger Go To Hell
(Somewhere West of Denver, December 1956)
My Dearest Ruth,
I’m beginning this as the train pulls out of Union Station. The day is bright and sunny, though it snowed here last night, and I imagine it’s as fine a way to spend a Christmas Eve as any, being ferried on steel rails through the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. I’ll post the letter when we reach Grand Junction, and then I’ll be traveling on to Sacramento. I have quite a lot of work to do before the semester begins. I hope that you’re well, and I hope this holiday season finds you in all ways better than did the last.
When I spoke with Sarah Beringer in Chicago last week, she was emphatic that I write and tell you of my encounter with Marquardt and her woman, though I can’t imagine I have anything to say that will prove useful to anyone who’s had as much firsthand experience with those two as have you. I’m also not especially keen to revisit that autumn evening in Providence. It still, on occasion, gives me nightmares. I’ve awakened in a cold sweat from dreams of the gathering on Benefit Street. Regardless, I promised Sarah that I would write, and I do hope that I may be of some help to you, no matter how small. I trust, of course, your discretion in this matter, and I trust that what I write here will be kept strictly between the two of us.
As you know already, as Sarah has told you, I met Marquardt through an acquaintance, an anthropologist formerly on faculty in the Dept. of Archeology at Brown. He has asked that I please omit his name from any and all accounts I may write on the subject of Dr. Adelie Marquardt, and I am bound by our friendship to oblige him. It matters only that he knew of my interest in Dagon and in Semitic Mesopotamian fertility gods in general and that, through him, the fateful introduction was made, following a lecture at Manning Hall. That was on the afternoon of October 12th of last year, and it was there that I was invited to the gathering on Benefit Street. I admit that I found Marquardt personable enough on our
