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One of the few mercies afforded us.
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R OOMS, MOODS, tenses away, Yackle sat on the floor, her legs stretched out at right angles to each other and to her spine. She was spry from ankles to the bottom of her rib cage; above that, her torso was boled and contorted. Much like the beleaguered Glikkuns with their humps, she guessed. As she imagined them, anyway.
She didn’t sleep, though. Sleep was no blessing to her, not until it was the final sleep. Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
She didn’t sleep because she didn’t need sleep. She didn’t, it seemed, need to see, or really to eat. She hadn’t required to move her bowels nor relieve her bladder in over a year. Everything seemed to come and go through her lungs.
So she sat and clasped her knees, stretching her backbone. She listened to the sound of ticking. She hadn’t remembered the maunts being much for clocks; after all, they lived as much as they could manage in holy time, which was an anomaly, a contradiction, a tautology: the time in which time has no meaning. A paradox. What was the word?
She wasn’t losing language, was she?
She couldn’t be losing touch.
An oxymoron, that was it. Holy time. Hah.
Though how she longed to slip into it, even though she didn’t—couldn’t—believe in such a notion. This must be, she guessed, how the young felt about the nonsense stories of fantasy that their grandmothers told them—the youngest of three daughters to lose her way in the forest. The little copper fish in the mythical blue sea. The funny one about the quill pen that made wishes come true—verbatim. Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls….
And anyway, here she was doing the same: imagining herself inside a clock, the sprock-sprock of the mechanism inching along the circumference of an hour. The play of the gears, the lunge of the pendulum, the creep of the hands, the aperture of now simultaneously opening and closing at precisely the same ratio forever. But there were no clocks in the mauntery except for the sundial, which spoke its moon-hours as silently as its sun-hours. Of this, the more she thought about it, the more sure she became.
Is it the heart, my old heart, she th
ought—or whoever’s old heart lives in my old chest? Can I now hear it ticking like a timepiece?
Or has the mauntery itself become a clock, a tall, rooted old stone clock, and the maunts, in their nervous twitchy sleep, the little mice that ran up and down its shifting weights, hickory-dickory mice?
But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn’t done before. How novel. She’d start seeing ghosts next, if she was lucky. Always a treat, always a hoot, this burden of living beyond the range of one’s life expectancy!
She turned her head toward the window. From this point on the compass, her room faced a mounting bank of clouds, and what to the Lion looked like turquoise would have seemed, to someone in Yackle’s room, a swollen sludge of violet. Yackle, though seeing nothing, imagined a sky with an octopus-ink tide rolling in, snuffing out young stars. Her instincts were still sharp, sharper than she knew.
Had she learned enough of Brrr to trust him?
She didn’t need to know every tittle and jot of his mortification. What she had deduced was that, despite his many abrasions, his lop-cut life, he was still not beyond shame. And that excoriating lash that whips us all has some little benefit: It motors our aspirations to avoid its next hissing strike.
She had listened to his memories, as much as she could—some of them spoken aloud, though he may not have realized he was speaking; others of them rehearsed in silence—but her ears were good. She had found after a day that he seemed to have an endless capacity for mucking things up. Perhaps his history of fecklessness provided him the perfect alibi to be the treasurer of what she knew, and was hiding within her still.
Could she trust him with what she knew? And then, perhaps, die?
Or was this a temptation that she should avoid at all costs—even at the price of giving up the mortal death promised us all?
Then, a nervous spasm caught in her throat for an instant, and she found herself thinking on what the Lion had asked her. That old Brrr. His raw manner didn’t fool her for an instant. He was no more a hardboiled truncheon than she was. What had he asked? If she perhaps possessed an other life, one too deep down in her memory to experience it, so all her protestations were only that: the crazed defense of a crazy woman.
No, she thought; no, it can’t be. I have entertained that possibility eight hundred times before, and I’ve always turned away from it: no. Brrr had been right to suppose that something small would have given her former life away: a spoon, a string of celery caught in the teeth, the way clouds can look like octopus ink. Something would have caught in an earlier memory, if there had been one. But no random spark of dailiness had ever connected with any life predating the time that she woke up, born an old woman naked in a daybed.
Brrr was there before her in her mind. She couldn’t picture him exactly, but whatever she could envision was rolling his eyes and fiddling with a pen he could scarcely govern. “Why did you take such an interest in Elphaba?” he wondered aloud. “Why would the story of Elphaba and Nessarose have caught at you so?”
“You tell me,” she rattled back, in her mind, giving testimony at midnight. Or was she withholding it?
“The mentally deranged have no capacity for memory,” he said. “You’re the mad Aunt Sophelia, maybe. Lady Partra’s other daughter; Melena’s older sister; the aunt of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Shell, who is now Emperor of Oz. The real Thropp Descending.”
“Were I to believe that, I’d be guilty of delusions of grandeur,” she said, “then I would truly be mad, and if anyone could find a way to put me away even further than a crypt, they’d be correct to do so at once.”
“I’ve never heard proof that Sophelia died,” said Brrr, “and your age would just about conform, I guess, with how old she would be if she still lived.”
“That’s nuts,” she replied. “You’re insane.”
“Not I.” He smiled as he began to fade from her mind. “You, after all, are having this conversation with yourself. I’m off asleep somewhere else.”
