Guises Read online

  I’m at my expert best. Incisions in the abdomen and groin, hauling out the coils of slick coral necklaces to throw across her shoulder. My hand is buried inside up to the wrist. I’m shaking, bathed in the sooty moonlight which reflects gray in the nearby Thames. I’m fantasizing you, bound by lace to brass bedposts, your hair in damp rivulets across both shoulders, wide hips receiving the thrusts which merge us completely.

  But I would never want to hurt you for you are the decent cool virgin, willing to be my locked-up object of veneration forever. I could never do to this to you so I do it to her. Stabbing again and again. Decorating the alley with the loose sanguine roses I would lavish you with.

  And I return, exhausted, sated.

  “I understand,” you tell me. “Lust is for animals. We remain faithful to one another with a purer, higher form of devotion. I must be content that each drop of blood splattered is in an arc of kisses to me. I know that when you disembowel her, you really cut out your own center for me. In a manner which doesn’t endanger either of us with the frenzy that is desire.”

  I wipe my hands partially clean on a handkerchief. I then fold it into an origami flower—not unlike one of those roses I have drawn on the alley wall—and I give it to you. You press it to your cheek.

  “And, one day,” I say, “when your own excitement truly reaches its peak, you will still give your body to no man. It will remain a shrine for me forever.”

  You place the bloodied linen in your beaded clutch purse. “You really think I’ll ever be able to…release myself…like that?”

  “You’re going to demonstrate to the world the full extent of passion. Languishment, ardent hunger, beguin. I’ll be so proud.”

  Music swells in the background from a recording in a hidden recess in the wall, tripped by a motion detector and mimicking the tinny strings of an old-fashioned music hall.

  I unfurl my cloak from gasping fog. Your upturned face has the physics of a diamond, diaphanous with an angelic light that the ancient black and white photos of Miss Lizzie don’t give her credit for. But looking down into this face, I detect flaws scratched on the crystal inside the diamond by a cruel demonic nail one can’t perceive when looking straight-on. We approach, very close, lips parted but a few inches apart. I exhale as you do, our breaths mingling without a carnal touching. The doxie’s blood splashed into my mouth and you can taste it. The air we share is vibrant with crimson, sweet with the knowledge that justice will possess neither of us.

  4. Loyung Tapestry

  Into the next display, running down the hallway to it holding spectral hands. Breathless.

  “It’s the China room!” I exclaim.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” you inquire, grinning for perhaps no other reason save my enthusiasm.

  I pause. “Yes, I think so.”

  (Have we been here before?)

  “The name alone,” you say. “China. Chi-na. It sounds marvelous.”

  We tiptoe in with wonder. This place is almost as sumptuous as the umbilical center of all the silk roads. You appear to grow yards of this material in shimmering gauzy rainbows with every step you take inside. It unwinds in bolts from your shoulders and hips, nightingales and temple kittens peering from your sudden voluminous sleeves. Bells bloom from the shadows of your hair, and your skin becomes the color of the gold threads from which your slippers are woven.

  You are dressed for the wedding of a willingly-captive princess to the man who has aroused you by crushing the city of your birth.

  I have removed my helmet and my blood-caked boots. I have had the corpses dragged out and the surviving female courtiers distributed to my generals. After all, this palace is mine now. I would have a glittering and clean court for the night I have planned with my beautiful prisoner. “I’ve had the skins of your father and brothers left stretched and drying in the sun—to make a new tent for my dogs. And it doesn’t disturb you to spread your legs for me?”

  I, in Oriental masquerade as a Manchu warrior astride a giant bronze horse, command you with poetry in a language of garnets and clay, murders in my beard.

  “The men here were weak. All they were interested in was discussing philosophy—only with each other—and painting waterfalls on silk. I would rather have been a pillow girl to an entire tribe of Tartars than wed to any one of them,” you answer, quite brazenly staring at the hard bands of muscles on my arms. The men my army found—and slaughtered here—were soft as rice.

  “A wedding gift,” I say, gesturing broadly to the grand offering on the floor. “To prove my love to you, my dragonfly.”

  You descend to open it, marveling at the workmanship on the lid of the camphor chest.

  “It’s beautiful, my king of conquerors. My emperor of fox spirits,” you reply sweetly. “My lord of graceful torments.”

  The heads of monks and princes fill the box, most of the faces familiar to you, riceball men you’d known since you were a child. Your trembling fingers caress the jeweled lips and eyes, humbled by this showy treasure of a husband’s devotion. Somewhere offstage concealed by curtains of crinoline, slaves pound the bridal gongs.

  “My loins shall bear you armies of demons,” you promise, your gaze meekly lowered for the first time, long lashes like black orchids against your cheeks. Gradually you release the folds of your garments, in sections like the darkness as it falls across the courtyards of a ruined tower. “Every one a son of serpents.”

  We entwine in a brocade of cinnamon thorns, being pricked and gouged along our buttocks and thighs. You will be even more beautiful scarred thus, I realize. You run your tongue along the ridges of my own old wounds. We rub our cut flesh together, pausing to dine on pickled butterfly wings wrapped about the toasted nipples of your less fortunate sisters. We drink rice wine laced with a minted opium. Our seizures moving the air strum nearby lutes of bone. I shall anticipate the blood of your breasts as we fiercely claim the nights in the Kun Lun Mountains.

  Suddenly you begin to weep. The tears roll down your face, leaving tiny tiger tracks in your porcelain make-up.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, placing my hand beneath your chin as if it were the bottom of a fragile teacup.

  You shake your head, unsure. The moment is too poignant.

  Or the moment rings false.

  Your tears turn to jade and fall to the floor, like the scattered beads of a severed necklace. 5. Lascaux

  “Hurry, hurry!” one or both of us cry.

  The night’s hours are slender with the darkness.

  “To the next room!”

  “Can’t wait to see what it is…”

  (Although perhaps we know already and that’s why we’re so anxious to reach it. Maybe we don’t, memory being an elusive property in dust.)

  We run down the hallway lined with portraits of the dead like us. Our faces flow as candle wax in an overheated cathedral, taking on their oil-painted semblances as we brush them with our fingers. It’s exhilarating, this rushing of emotions and minutiae, fragments of alien self-imprinted for fractured instants.

  The doorway is low, dark, simulating a temporary descent into the underground. This room is filled with fossils. It’s almost strangling with mustiness, cloying with fresh death.

  You grunt. I turn to you, dazzled by your nakedness. I want to tell you how fine your legs are, how long and muscled and dangerous. But I can’t speak. There are no words in my mind. There are only pictures of dawns and death.

  We crouch into the nightly hunt’s accumulation. We dip our hands into the bellies of deer. We pull the skins off still twitching rabbits in single sheaths. We linger over the stripped flanks of bovine ruminants we took down from the edges of their terrified herd. We paint cavalcades of bison on the cavern walls with their juices.

  We growl at these features staring back at us from the stones, almost as hungry for them as if they were alive. If they were here we would gladly kill them again. The heat of their blood and urine is like the sun on our faces, burrowing into their abdomens like
a return to the womb.

  I slurp too loudly and you laugh—a throaty burst as staccato as the explosion of little gases from the lower intestine of an eviscerated bear.

  We ponder stars popping in the fire that we worship as we suck eye fruit from trophy skulls. We share them between savage lips and teeth, like ripe cherries from the chasm that falls forever beyond the cliffs of our dominion. If there is a better life anywhere, we can’t guess what it is.

  The sounds of the darkness press outside, mastodons trumpeting toward stars while saber toothed tigers howl toward their particular favorite of the moon. Death is abroad as it is during the day. But it takes on a shape at night in the prehistoric forests that forces us to dream with our eyes open, hungry for shadows just as deadly as those we make ourselves. Dying is far away and at our fingertips. It’s a flavor we carry on our tongues every instant. We share it in a kiss that makes it seem as if we are dying—forever—and living immortal.

  This is primitive paradise, you and I. You are a queen in a train of furs, snarling the feral song as I mimic the baritone howl of wolves. I roll across you, sweating a pelt of musk, the hard back of your neck between my teeth an embrace of tender violence. Together we roar.

  In a country with yet no name, where loup garous will one day be famed as ancient terrors, our lovemaking shakes and shapes the earth.

  6. Dance Macabre

  “I feel the morning coming,” you say, shivering in the corridor beneath a skylight which yet appears all dark.

  “It’s hours away,” I assure you.

  But I sense it, too, in the way the darkness sizzles. We hurry down the hall across thick carpets, their mandalas abruptly appearing to be part of a system of cabalistic symbols that keeps us trapped here. I wonder if I found a way to scratch them out if we would be free to pass on again, going to whatever afterlife we were jerked back from.

  But then I look at you and I don’t want to change this. This could be a crossroads where those who are constrained by their centuries never to meet may become lovers.

  Or it might be a damnation. For butchers and the perverse. For those who never quite get the humanity thing right. Going through the motions to end up with the same slaughter, the same empty thrill.

  You reach out and touch me. A simple gesture. There is no grasp.

  “I just want to feel your warmth,” you say. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that we have any heat at all?”

  “I think I love you,” I reply fiercely, clutching at that pearly hand of yours, squeezing it until I’m convinced that this hour, this night, it’s truly made of flesh.

  You don’t shrink from the pain. No, it’s a wonderful thing to revel in. It’s an experiences of senses long accustomed to the prodigal and profligate, and long denied in the dust. Your eyes are half-closed, lips parting to reveal the edges of your teeth. Your mouth still has a smear of my blood on it from the last room.

  “I think I love you, too,” you tell me. “Here is the next exhibit. Let’s go in and find what pleasures its scraps and fetishes may hold for us.”

  The area is huge, sweeping with medieval pageantry. Everything in it has been laid about to resemble a merry fair, yet closer inspection reveals traces of underlying filth, areas where the background has putrified till it hangs in rancid tatters. But it’s easy to reconcile. Each object from that era was once touched by someone who touched maggots, who tasted and was tasted by rats.

  It doesn’t matter. There is music being blared from trumpets and strummed on mandolins. Jugglers expertly toss skulls painted into bright balls. Gypsy women tell strangely elliptic fortunes. A knight from the most recent crusades is riding a cart that’s pulled by his faithful squire, a vile desert venereal condition having left Sir Righteous crippled, his testicles the size of Persian melons. A dirty gaggle of children chases along after the cart, giggling, lobbing rocks in an effort to hit these grotesque nodes. A clown entertains by swallowing live scorpions. A troop of acrobats—each missing at least a leg or arm—spins in lopsided patterns through the air.

  “What shall we do here, my darling?” you ask me.

  And then you withdraw behind a drape, apparently having decided upon your role.

  As for myself, I’m a member of a charnel cult that has come to Ferrara to work the perimeter of this carnival. My septic brothers and sisters sell black kisses for a centesimo or striped shrouds for a few lira. Dancing skeletons and harlequin flesh are sewn with tiny bells. I hear them ring, jingle, boom their message in rhyme.

  They announce, “The dead are not asleep! They laugh and love; they want and weep!”

  And I, as proud Death, bang a bubo drum. The huge plague rat in my codpiece makes the city wenches scream. They clutch back their ragged skirts and aprons with feigned terror, always lifting the hems a bit too high for modesty. So delicious that I want to lay each one of them down in the dirt for my love. I have lain with scores of them as we parade to entice sleepy villages into visiting the show. My troubadour breath is as blue as lung blood.

  I call, “I sing for my lady, ruby bubbles upon her lips. Fattened on the Reaper’s bread, winding sheet about her hips.”

  I see you descend your lunatic bower, jasmine and worms encircling your heart. You are drawn by the fever as cloudy about me as the coarse yellow smoke which rises from the morning’s bonfires, struck at the cathedral. You are not as bold as the wenches but the desire you have for my rat glitters in your eyes.

  “Pardon me, sir. What is the name of this circus?” you ask.

  “This is the Carnival of Apocalypse, Madam. The Whore of Babylon arrived on a ship in Messina’s port and now she sits astride all our faces. But we see how it’s yet possible to pleasure her and still die with smiles on our lips. Come with us, lady,” I invite, claw of my hand out. “Do you not need to laugh again?”

  You hesitate. Your brow furrows as you gaze at the gaunt crow-people, each stricken with pestilence, flesh pulled back from their teeth that chatter, “The dead are not asleep! They eat and drink; sow and reap!”

  Boldly I stick out my hand and grab your full breast.

  “Is that a ripe egg of infection or are you genuinely the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seduced?” I squeeze it. It doesn’t feel loose with pus and no dark stain of burst blister appears on the silk across your bosom. I leer like the duke of necrophiles.

  But you are slowly veering away from me, turning around and around. You are confused and afraid. At first I think it’s only part of your act.

  “Is this the way it’s supposed to be?” you ask in a timid voice, as if a germ of conscience has wriggled into your dusty mind. “Is there nothing…softer?”

  I bounce before you, stinking of sex in catacombs.

  “Come with me, lady. I’ll give you bells for your feet and for the mottled flesh of your belly. I’ll paint your loins with delirium.”

  You look at me for a sad moment, trying to see past the harlequin, the rotting bruises, the shroud.

  But at last you surrender with a laugh, sighing as you open your gown to reveal your bosom. The breasts are not plague berries. They are round and pale, freckles dusting the tops. You pull the dress apart further for the whiteness of your stomach, further for the triangle of Botticelli blond curls between your legs.

  And I begin to drag you to me, beneath me. But I see a glimpse of something that stays me. First is a thigh tattoo of a song about an axe murderess, the holes from the needle which bled like a virgin’s pricking and leaked like afterbirth. Next is a jade teardrop snared in the pubic hair. Third and about the waist is smeared animal grease and a fur belt donned for the first shapeshift of history. Last are streaks of blood that seem to flow behind us like a river.

  I choke on the staleness of the atmosphere, feeling cold from the air conditioning that attacks from unseen vents in the walls.

  You’re shivering, too.

  We reach out toward each other. For the warmth. Turning away from that very medieval—very ancient—poison.

  Th
ere is an explosion. There’s light, loud in screams, as of the outrage of dawn like a nun. We’re snatched back from the room with the pavilions of gold and scarlet banners. We are flown in a fury down the hall, past the portraits of silenced souls. Past the primitive splendor of noble beasts. Past artifacts of malachite phalluses and ginger wombs. Past dreams of gaslight and forbidden rouge.

  We are laid out cruelly but ceremoniously back in the exhibit cases, opposite ends of the museum. The glass owns us again. The old bones inhale our spirits into cobwebs which the curator will smooth away before the doors open to allow entrance to the ghouls.

  The curator’s hands are always so cold.

  7. Daydreams In The Exhibit

  We’re not in graves but these stagnant boxes of disgrace may as well be that. They are as close to resting in peace again as we’ll have and the exhibits after dark are as close to heaven…

  Not that we ever rested in peace. Or would have ever gone anywhere near heaven.

  You don’t remember after the morning comes to tear us apart, when the clocks chime in sunlight in what must always sound like a death knell to me. We’ve been withdrawn to the numbered fragments of a few relics under glass.

  Some file past us smiling.

  Some flick their tongues.

  Or bite their lips.

  Seem trying to reach inside the exhibit case as if we were police evidence to be surreptitiously fondled: severed fingers, forensic valentines amd ganglia bouquets, genitalia assembled by a grisly love in a passionate ritual they burn to experience, if only second hand.

  (Viscerally, vis-a-vis.)

  Our dust almost plumes up toward their eager faces, sensing a peculiar calefaction. But we’re inanimate—rendered down to that most alone of states. Where death is frigid and compulsion falls short of the orgasmic leap it once promised.

  We don’t even remember the games of dangerous love we played. Nor the names nor centuries we adopted. It’s only the febrile heat decorated with blood, the burgeoning epidemic fever which woke our senses for a few hours. It’s the warmth we recall.