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CANTO
THE FOURTH
32
Forward.
I move forward. There is comfort in my feet, pads thick as ra
in-boots. I woke up, after all, with the Monkey murmuring over my head. The Wall smells of ambergris and its flowers are weighted like suicides. Hunting the old emerald self, dingy facets of a forgotten sapphire elbow or garnet knee, merrily we go along hunting the sloughed shells of me on this corpulent Road, we highwaymen looking to rob ourselves. Once perhaps I was a streak of charcoal painting the Road like a cannibal, but I could not say. My mind is a laundry line, flapping white wings as a rinsed sky, drops on a tin washboard. (But are there welts on my back, measured kisses of the rack? Oh, yes.)
Here we go round, here we go round and what do I expect from the svelte malarial dawn but another suspense of hours? There is comfort in a tail around one’s neck, I suppose. I walk looking down, trying to see what the Grasshopper saw, the prim insects that once were Walls. Trying to see the next step on the Path, trying to see where in these muddy tracks the spider-leg pinpricks twist, trying to divine subsequence as though it were water. (It is as though a thing has been taken from me, now that I am named, now that I am gold. I slip, I cannot hold a thought.
But I am not concerned. The sun shines through me like a sieve, I cannot hold the ragged tuxedo tails of my dream, I slide easily along the Path, a little chipped-paint boat. I cannot think, I can hardly feel my body, the only weight being the fat rose-green Compass resting as solidly as a breadloaf in my spacious belly. I am made of air, suddenly, constructed of my own breath. Because of a name which somehow takes as it is given? Because of a border, a limit, a Wall which walks with me, cradling close.
Call me by name and inchoate I will sidle up to your princely thigh, call me by name and be made an alms-cup, be made mendicant on my Temple steps, be beggared and crippled because I cannot be a word, only a word, a tongue-curl which is me, a flick of lip, a syllable or two, certainly not three, and is this me after all, chained to the sea floor by a creeping sound, vermin of aural combinations? It is not so pretty a madness when it is named, then it is a patient, wrapped in white and pinned to a butterfly board. Then it does not blaze or consume and I am not, I am named and still as Stone, it is not what I wanted, what I came for, no, not what the contract stated, but I will take it with grace—)
“Do you smell it?” The Monkey sniffs the air, alert and aroused, face banging into the air like a hickory switch. “I smell the chlorinated honey-grim, I smell the hominy and loam. Hoo! It is the End.”
I looked where he did, and saw nothing but the linear Wall stretching like a cat’s claw, and the tallow of the horizon.
“It is an empty day, Monkey. It is a day for walking. I do not think we will find anything. It is a day for Skimming Over, cream from milk.”
The Monkey bit his lip and ventured a resigned little chuckle.
“If you like. But I can smell sap and plum sauce. We are Nearing.”
“Oh, stop,” I sighed, “Can you not speak to me outside of riddle-realm?”
“Should I speak of the Bear we abandoned to his beauty? Should I speak of your visions? Should I preach the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?” He paused like an insect on a leaf. “Should I speak of how I do not wish it, after all this, to be the End?”
“Do you not?” He looked earthward, blushing if a Monkey could blush.
“No. I am accustomed to you now. I should not be surprised. It is always like this, and I am always sad. Hoo. It is the smell of the sky on your shoulders that does it, that roots me to you at the last of all possible moments. Let us try to be quiet. Words spoil everything.”
And so we went, softly and methodically, Monkey dozing off on my shoulder and politely remaining smugly silent. And of course I could not see what was ahead, could not see the terminus, the road sign marking the last detour, could not see its nailed boards and blue shadow until we nearly tripped over it.
“I told you, I told you,” hooted the Monkey, clapping his little hands. “I smelled it miles ago! Humangirl, your nose is a poor servant. The End! The Uttermost End.” He danced a little, though less happily than he once did, when in the delicious throes of proving me wrong.
It was nothing more than a little Door, no higher than my wedding-band waist, arching to a delicate point at its crown, like a Bishop’s miter. Deep blue, was the Door, expanse of India ink, flowing tempura-thick over boards knotted and hewn with a dull axe. Vaporous frescoed stars floated around its rim, edges blurred and fading into the expansive blue, giving each a pale aureole, a vague corona. I felt myself falling into the color, as though it were truly a lake and if touched would ripple outwards from my finger. But there was no knob anywhere on its ornate surface, and it did not leap out or gobble us where we stood. In fact, it had not even been following us. We had stumbled on it quiescent and still, and even now it made no move to seize us.
“Why doesn’t it want us, Ezekiel?” I marveled, slightly disappointed.
“Do you want it?”
“Well, no, of course not, it’s dreadful . . . but . . . I cannot quite say . . . yes, I think I do. It is Not Like the Others.”
“No, my Kore, my love, it is not. It is the Last Door, Your Door, and this is the last day. Not the cream but the last dregs of milk. And I must leave you to it.” He smiled wanly and scratched his elbow.
“You are a slippery little thing. You come when I do not want you and go when you please. You drag me out of the crone’s hut only to leave me here, when I don’t even know how to open a Door I shouldn’t want ajar. I am nearly dead, if my jaundiced skin didn’t advertise it, and you will go and leave this bird’s wing Door as my headstone.”
I wept a little, but it was cursory, the shedding of such valuable tears as my own metallic drops. (Collect them and be a sultan, be a banker, be a thief of forty) I knew it all along. When long, long now before I lay beneath the radiating Angel I was alone with her, in her arms so cold they burned, and it would be so again. I am the Maiden, and when the Maiden faces the Queen it is alone, so no one will see that she thinks the monarch beautiful and worthy of love, even as she seizes what is hers from those white arms.
“Hoo! Darlinggold, if you think you have been carrying a Key all this Way for any other purpose but to open a Door, then you are a silly girl and you do not know how these stories go. It is the Uttermost End. Everything is simple from here on out.” I tried to hide my surprise that he knew of the Lobster’s little Key, which I still had nestled in my pack.
“As for the rest, at the end, you are always alone, it is inevitable. The Maiden goes on, the Beast stays behind and catches tears in his whiskers. But as I have tried to tell you, even this is only an event, not a true end. It is the borderland of a sequence of events, but there is no revelation to be had. There is no conceivable end in this place, it goes onandonandon, past the last permutation of a chess game, past the last rose that ever grew. ‘Last’ and ‘End’ are meaningless here, and when you go through the Door you will find nothing more than the Road stretching on, downdowndown, past where you thought it must end. I have played my part for you, within you. Now it is done and I will go back to what dark corners Beasts originate from, and you to the cloistered courtyard that all Maidens find behind the last Door, even if it is not truly the last. But perhaps it is, after all,” his eyes twinkled. “I have been known to lie.”
“There is still so much I do not understand,” I said softly. “I do not even know, truly, who you are.” He threw his skinny arms around my neck and stared into my marble eyes.
