Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (42 page)

I take the bait, because I almost always take the bait.

“But the snail replied ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance,” I say, quoting Lewis Carroll, and she doesn’t laugh. She starts to scratch at the welts below her chin, then stops herself.

“In the halls of my mother,” she says, “there is such silence, such absolute and immemorial peace. In that hallowed place, the mind can be still. There is serenity finally, and an end to all sickness and fear.” She pauses, and looks at the floor, at the careless scatter of empty tin cans and empty bottles and bones picked clean. “But,” she continues, “it will be lonely down there, without you. It will be something even worse than lonely.”

I don’t reply, and in a moment, she gets to her feet and goes to stand by the door.

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora. My spirit moves me to tell of bodies changed into new forms.
So begins Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, the monumental braiding of Greek myth into Latin epic which in its time came in second only to Vergil’s
Aeneid
as the preeminent poem of the classical world; its continuing influence through the medieval and Renaissance periods into the modern day is incalculable. If you know the stories of Echo and Narcissus, or Arachne the weaver, or Daphne who escaped from last-struck Apollo to become the laurel tree,or Pygmalion who carved himself a lover of ivory that warmed to flesh in his embrace, you have Ovid and his
mutatas formas,
his changed shapes, to thank for it.

Caitlín R. Kiernan sings of the
changing.
Again and again throughout these stories, their subjects (or objects) are reshaped in ways both figurative and fleshly: from wolves, into doorways, into states of becoming which have no fixed end, no aetiological resolution. The transitions can be as simple as the consent which makes the difference of a sacrifice or the snap of a shutter which preserves a moment of intimacy as art. Some entail only a shift of understanding: the recognition by practical Cala Weatherall of “The Melusine (1898)” that she hungers for more in her world than the clear laws of mathematics and a bed untroubled by men. Some are achievable only through the completion of complex sequences of action: the comprehensive medical-sociological modifications of “I Am the Abyss and I am the Light,” the title ritual of “The Belated Burial.” No one leaves any of these stories as they entered, if only in awareness of that fact.

In some, the act of transformation accompanies an identifiable narrative motive. The nameless young man of “Rappaccini’s Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5)” makes himself a poisoned garden in order to avenge the death of his twin brother; he is at once mastermind, decoy, and murder weapon, Vindice playing the venom-smeared skull. (All revenge tragedies are metamorphoses. The bereaved become the reavers: Benjamin Barker into Sweeney Todd, Beatrix Kiddo into The Bride. The agent of their conversion, an absorption into the habits and movements of another as attentive and limerent as love.) The narrator of “Dancing with the Eight of Swords” derives pleasure from the serial murder of her “beautiful ones,” a process which involves the application of cold and cyanoacrylate and renders its recipients “sculpture.” The storyteller of “The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade” imitates his namesake in order to prolong his life, already so altered by his captivity among the changelings of Federal Hill that any move he makes to retain it feels less like self-preservation than volunteering for further uncertainty. Change in these cases is a means to an end, the byproduct of a process oriented elsewhere; that it occurs is not inconsequential, but neither was it the primary drive. More often, though, change is its own
raison d’être.
The one piece of horror in this book is the lead story, where a wolf robbed of her pelt like a selkie of its skin discovers she cannot reclaim it; she can possess the physical object of fur and hide, but she will still die locked in this insufficient human body, diminished from what she once was. Other characters strain to become more than they are, or to experience as closely as possible that which is. As much as sex or food or breathing, the impulse to be
other
is, in Kiernan’s fiction, an essential and justified desire.

The word is used advisedly. Ovid’s explorations of identity through its loss or alteration are not solely sexual in theme or focus, but his most memorable stories are those impelled by love or desire, especially the transgressive or ambiguous which implicitly question the limits by which the normal is defined—the incestuous obsessions of Myrrha and Byblis,the genderbending romance of Iphis and Ianthe, the infamous, fatal passion of Pasiphae for her bull. The twenty-five stories reprinted here under the heading of “Weird Romance” were originally published in
Sirenia Digest,
whose subtitle until February 2010 was
A Monthly Journal of the /Weird and I Weirdly Erotic.
Some of the most striking images in this collection are of sexual congress, fundamentally presented
as
a transgressive act—stepping beyond the boundaries, an appropriately polymorphous definition as it applies to anything from simple kink to the transfiguring or annihilating communion of which the human sexual act is posited as a pale, striving reflection:

“The surgeon—the cannibal surgeon—lays aside her clamps and scalpel, and she stares deeply into her lover’s one remaining eye. All the universe is cradled within that eye, which is the soft green of moss after a spring rain. And she says, ‘No, I cannot take your voice away.’ Before her confused lover can respond, the cannibal says to her, ‘I see now that there is more to me than appetite, and more to you than the capacity for surrender. Already, I have taken more than I deserve, and I will take no more, not now or ever.’”

—“The Bed of Appetite”

When the sleek purplish tip of the hidden organ or appendage emerges from the folds of her labia, there are audible gasps from the audience. The girl encircles it with her left thumb and middle finger, and the spotlight glimmers wetly off that taut iridescent shaft. But before the watchers can mistake her for some common hermaphrodite, the head of the shaft swells slightly and the foreskin opens to reveal minute rows of needle-like teeth. At least, they look more like teeth than anything else, and so the girl has always
thought
of them as teeth.

—“Untitled Grotesque”

She reaches down to the thatch of the bound woman’s pubic hair, and easily slips the detached finger into her—blood making such an excellent lubricant—then works it in and out, in and out, time after time after time.

—“Concerning Attrition and Severance”

She starts to take the melusine’s hand, recalling again details of her vivid dreams—the wordless embraces in lightless, submerged halls formed of coral and the carved ribs of leviathans. Already, she knows the taste of the mclusine’s thin pink lips, the feel of those vicious teeth upon her skin, the unspeakable pleasure of the faerie’s mouth and hands and those appendages for which men have not ever devised names upon her and probing deeply within her.

—“The Melusine (1898)”

And now my head fills up with the vision of the blonde, her flesh gone hard as stone, and, since water ice is, indeed, a mineral, she
was
stone, yes, and she was fossilized, and I’d become Pygmalion inverted. She was not so thoroughly colorless as marble, but the frost that dappled the white, white skin of this Galatea was near enough, I think. “I kissed her frozen lips,” I say. “But Aphrodite took no mercy on me.”

—“Dancing with the Eight of Swords”

And then you kiss me, and our lips fuse, and now we are one, and now we are whole, a closed system, an odd sort of Ouroboros, the perfected Gemini.

—“Lullaby of Partition and Reunion”

Edith places the tip of one index finger into the nearer end of the slit in the sand. Except it is not merely sand, though there is something of quartz granules and mica flakes and dark specks of feldspar in its composition.
It is flesh
crafted
from sand
, she thinks,
or sand painstakingly crafted from flesh.
The gross physiology is self-evident now, the
labia majora
and
labia minora
, the
glans clitoris
and clitoral hood. It weeps, or simply secretes, something not so different from sea foam. And lying within it is the teardrop-shaped stone that Sammie slipped inside herself while standing in the tub.

—“The Bone’s Prayer”

She’s gone, and the box is gone, and the trapezohedron is gone. There’s very little remaining to prove she was ever here. I cannot conceive that one woman’s body and soul were possibly enough to appease that hunger. It is all beyond my comprehension.

—“At the Gate of Deeper Slumber”

This is more than metamorphosis as the external manifestation of sexual knowledge or the means of its achievement, the frisson of the strange or the reassurance of self-image by counterexample. This is an eroticism of metamorphosis itself, where the capabilities of the human body to be augmented/deformed/replaced/reconceived are as powerfully charged as whatever uses that newly altered body might afterward be put to, where the small responsive properties of clit or cock or nipple are merely intimations of the greater pliability of the world in which Kiernan’s characters make their assignations and play their parts. There is a reason the sea moves through so many of these stories, the parent and original of their fluid, uncontainable nature. (
Protean
: from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the primordial sea-god whom Menelaos in the
Odyssey
must grasp and hold fast while he shifts from seal to lion to serpent, even to the unsentient shapes of water or tree; he will prophesy, but only to one who does not let him go. In none of Kiernan’s stories can the otherworld be held where it does not deign to remain.) It has no final form, no fixity. All is in flux. So we rarely see interactions between two simply human beings, unless one of them is in the process of becoming otherwise; the vectors of change are themselves subject to it, like the sea-assimilated siren-vampire of “Flotsam” or the marsh-lover of “Fecunditatum,” who was once a woman in her great-grandfather’s greenhouse and now plants seeds of her own within the narrator’s welcoming flesh. Sometimes there are catalysts, stimulants—a bony disk, an old metal box, an instrument fallen from the sky, a peculiar greenish stone—but these objects, too, rarely keep the shapes in which they were (or allowed themselves to be, since the distinction of in-animate, much like the division between the terrible and the transcendent, is so permeable in these stories as to be nearly meaningless) discovered. In one of the gentlest stories, “Beatification,” we observe the protagonist in the last stages of her preparation for a ritual feast in honor of Mother Hydra (the Lovecraftian sea-figure Kiernan has most made her own, another casual transformation) at the hands of a “pretty eunuch.” The shaving, the anointing with spiced oils, the stuffing with “peeled garlic gloves and whole yellow chanterelles, diced shiitakes, peppercorns, and ripe cranberries” are almost cosmetic adjustments, the taste of her blood “[o]nly an intimation of what is to come.” Unstated, she looks forward to her consumption by those who worship through her, their conduit of godhead; what she is becoming is transubstantiation. We do not see the miracle completed, the violet-eyed woman as we knew her finished. Where the story ends, in our minds she is always changing. At the ends of some stories, we do not even know into whit.

The
other.
There must be lines drawn somewhere, or the act of crossing them is without meaning. A recurring motif in
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
, appropriate to its genre, is the sexual meeting with something the narrator can neither categorize nor entirely understand, which is both damning and correct. It seduces, sometimes. Sometimes it asks no leave. (Janet held on to Tam Lin while he was changed in her arms to beast after wild beast, a red-hot burning iron last of all: she cannot let go until he is a man in his own mother-naked skin again or the fairy land’s hold over him will remain. She was carrying his child, her own body changing. Had she failed, his heart would have been turned to stone within him, his eyes made into knots of tree. Imagine running your fingertips over the wooden eyes of the man you love, the cursed toy of the fairy queen. The fairy lady of “Murder Ballad No. 6” kisses the lips of a man with stranger eyes than these.) Here as in Kiernan’s earlier, less explicitly erotic work, there is a terrifying immanence in yielding to something which is incomprehensibly greater than oneself, after which nothing, literally, can ever be the same. Knowledge is a hole in the world into which her characters fall, not because early film history or classical literature or planetary science are valueless disciplines, but because they cannot pertain to the place where words run out. Namelessness, an existence beyond the reductive summations of human taxonomy, in fact seems to designate the most successful kind of metamorphosis.

“A Canvas for Incoherent Arts” at first appears to be the outlier in th is table of contents. The title is a nod to the
Salon des Arts In cohere Ms
of fin-de-siècle Paris, an avant-garde, anti-art movement interested in the deliberate presentation of the irrational, the experimental, and the absurd, a sort of proto-Dada incorporating everything from found art to conceptual art to works of mixed media where the media could include a live rabbit, a painted man, and a moon made of yesterday’s bread; given the combination of caprice and strict objective that governs the characters’ interactions, it seems an appropriate allusion. There is a striking absence of overt metamorphosis. A woman waits alone in a room; she is left the same way—perhaps—after a brief, disturbing visit from a second party so practiced in camouflaging their physical tells—footsteps, voice, even distance—that s/he appears as anonymous and ominous as the walls of the “black room” within which they observe the rules of their long-played game. There is the possibility that a third person has been introduced into what has heretofore been a private exercise, although it is possible that the narrator is only intended to fear so. This is, after all, the ideal of the game: “You are here, in this black room, to scare me, and I am here to be scared.” And yet the title turns out to be literal—nothing in the black room has coherence except the narrator’s anxiety, which she
can
name and describe, the adrenaline nausea, the dry throat, the stinging prickle of sweat, the unsettling combination of annoyance and true dread as she is forced to wonder whether the game has finally altered in ways she was not prepared for, despite her anticipatory acceptance of the start conditions: “I am alone in the room... and I have absolutely no way of knowing what will happen next.” The “unblemished darkness” has become the sea, without the sea’s comforting indifference. Everything may be shifting shape. Everything may
have
no shape. There is nothing in the dark to get hold of, but there is the awful prospect that the dark might reach out and take hold itself. The unknowable, the unnameable. It is perhaps the most minimalist story in the collection, and the most brutal.