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“But it would have been illusion. Nothing is the reality, the absence of Center and meaning. I carried it like a shawl around my shoulders. You would have laughed as I drowned naked.”
“How vivid. Cling to your little cliffs, if you must. My gifts are vast.” She bent her archer’s mouth around the ivory pipe. “Oh, humanchild, must we do this, must we play this game where I am a frightful Witch and you are the brave Maiden? Don’t you want to play something else? I am very nice, you know. Put your mouth on my wrist, it tastes of peppermint. Wouldn’t it be more fun? Why don’t you be the witch this time?” She smiled for the first time, teeth like a row of soldiers, leonine and seductive. I felt my old helplessness roving.
“I am dying and you speak of games. How long do you think I can sit at chatter before nightfall when I will be mad again? Give me what I came for.” The Angel shook her sapphire head.
“Oh, all right. You are such a stubborn little caryatid. You must always have it precise.” She cleared her throat dramatically and fluttered her razor wings wide.
“I will not!”
I spread my hands, hopelessly confused, lips parting in anguish, unable, at this last which is not last, to comprehend her animal mouth. She moved close, trailing her fingers from my waist to my chin, slowly, tattooing cold into my flesh, her dark eyes drawing those same snail-patterns inkless on glass skin.
“Oh, pretty little thing, we all play our parts for you. Do you like it, precious puella? Are we very good at what we do? Do we satisfy each and every night when that red, red curtain goes up? All of us glossy little ducks in a row? Do you love us, dearest, darling, only? Will you clap, clap, clap? Shall I bow at the end as I yield? Oh, Darlingglass, will you laugh at all the right parts?”
She laughed herself, deep in her throat, an intimate rumbling as she lay her silky head on my terrified chest. “It is all an act, my own, but it is all there is. All we have, you and I. The rapiers are real, the duel is true. But you never see the stage, tragicsylph. I suppose I cannot ask for that much. I am a witch forever, and you will fear and never love me.”
“Please,” I whispered through loose and prismed lips, “take it out of me, take it out, let me be whole.”
“You are close to the skin, now, beautiful, close to the rim, dancing out beyond its edge. You could put out your smallest finger and see the pattern. But it is not, after all, the Way of things. Come, come now, you must play your part, too. Threaten me, put your hands on my throat, tell me you will surely kill me like a brave and good Maiden ought to, if I do not wipe you clean as a window.”
She leaned upon me like a divan, smiling her disturbing kittenish smile, bewildering and lithe, full of snow. I put my hand tentatively over her mouth, shrill cold screaming lip to palm with the contact, and her eyes twinkled with mirth above the flesh-hyphen.
“Just stop laughing at me and help me. Or I . . . I shall. I shall throw all your fish back into the Road and shovel in the hole. I will snap your pipe and your rod. And . . . I shall Devour you piece by piece down to your last feather. I can do it.” I spoke in measured beats and though I didn’t really want to harm her, I understood instinctively that it was the Way. That was clear now, clear as I was.
“Oh, brava, darling,” she said, muffled by my hand which I removed without expression. “It is so very hard to be strong when you need something from someone.”
“I want to be well. I am not your mouse to bat between paws. I want to be as I was. I shall go if you do not, and whiten to dust among the poplars and whitethorn. and then you will have no one.”
The Angel’s face flushed with her pearl-blue light, her corona pulsing once, twice.
“Oh, Darlingglass, don’t get upset. This is all pre-determined, after all, written on the whalewalls in indelible ink, at least more indelible than mine. You cannot blame me for wanting to drag it out a bit. You are such lovely company. Kore, Kore, after all is done and done again, there is no end and no beginning, there is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.”
She leaned forward in a cloud of yucca blossom tobacco and ambergris, her face filling up my vision like a moon, and touched her lips to mine. I shrank back from her glacial kiss, breathing in gulps.
“My dear, this is how it is done. The Kiss that heals the Maiden, removes the thorn from her thumb. I gave you your delirium with a Kiss, and I take it back, as you have commanded. It is the Way. You have been such a good girl all this time, right on cue, will you allow propriety to keep your death snuggled up inside, just below your heart, safe and warm?”
She touched the skin of my sternum, where the Key had thrust, and leaned in again. This time I did not shrink, but allowed her snowdrift lips on mine, pressing like a vise, crushing the blood from my face, and the delicate bones, pushing her face downward (downdowndown) drawing me upward like a bucket from a well. Chewing lightly on my lower lips, still connected thus, she whispered, “At the other side of a Door lies nothing but another Door, and another, and another.”
Each “another” was punctuated by the press of her diamond teeth on my mouth. “I am the Door that catches you, and you must step through me, limb by limb. Come in, come in, my Darlingglass, it is the Way. Hoo.”
Her eyes were shut and in the sheen of her high cheeks I could see my reflection, irises large and green as sugar cane. I moved forward, only slightly, only slightly, an intake of breath, and I slid through the scrim of ice, I breathed through her skin, passing through her body and the wriggling trout and the ice caves like Temples, throug
h the river-network of her veins, where fish upon scaled fish spawned towards her great silver heart, booming cavernously,
(thumpthumpthump)
and I passed the threshold of her bones, and I passed the barrier of her spine, (ininin!)
and I breached the Wall of her muscled back, flowing through her in one long inhale. I went through her like a pane of glass.
My last hand disappeared through her torso with an exhale of smoke, smelling slightly of apples strewn over a field of cut wheat.
35
Such a simple thing, opening a Door.
Stepping through, the familiar series of movements, the old village dance. Feeling the rush of air as it shuts behind. So simple and sweet, to be whole in the dark. I understand now. I accept. The revelation is complete only here, in the soon-gone second, with nothing but blackness all around. This has all happened before. It will happen again. I can see myself stretching forward and back like a chain of paper dolls, walking through echoes and shadows of each other, held and rocked to sleep by the Labyrinth, which is constant and adoring. I understand. For one instant, I see the pattern before it is consumed again like a burned photograph.
There is only one Man, and only one Bar, and they walk into each other, and they are the same.
