Winter 2007 (6 page)

I even visited the remnants
of the mage’s college, following the ancient right wing of the library until it
dissolved into the even more crumbling walls of that venerable institution. All
I found there was a ruined amphitheater erupting in sedgeweeds, with a couple
dozen students at the bottom, dressed in black robes. They were being lectured
at by a man so old he seemed part of the eroded stones on which he sat. If
magic still remained in the world, it did not exist in this place.

All I had left were the
more modern texts and the memory of a phrase among the signs and symbols I had
used to animate the arm: “Make what you bring back your own.”

Each time I took the arm
out of the box, it came garlanded with thoughts I did not want but could not
make go away. Each time, I unraveled a little more. Dream and reality blended
like one of my parents’ more potent concoctions. Day became night and night
became day with startling rapidity. I had hallucinations in which giant flowers
became giant hands. I had visions of arms reaching from a turbulent, bloody
sea. I had nightmares of wrists coated with downy hair and mold.

I stopped bathing entirely.
I wore the same clothes for weeks. Her skin’s briny taste filled my mouth no
matter what cup I drank from. Her eyes stared from every corner.

***

“What did you do then?” my
guest would prod once again. He’d have finished his tea by now and he would be
wanting to leave, but ask despite himself.

“Don’t you know, Lucius?”
I’d reply. “Don’t you remember?”

“Tell me anyway,” he’d say,
to humor the other crazy old man.

“One night, sick with
weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating
theater and performed surgery on myself.”

A rapid intake of breath.
“You did?’

“No, of course not. You
can’t perform that kind of surgery on yourself. Impossible. Besides, the
operating theater has students and doctors in it day and night. You can’t sneak
into an operating theater the way you sneak into a cadaver room. Too many
living people to see you.”

“Oh,” he’d say, and lapse
into silence.

Maybe that’s all I’d be
willing to tell my Lucius surrogate. Maybe that’s the end of the story for him.

***

One night, sick with
weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating
theater and performed surgery on myself.

It wasn’t the operating
theater and I wasn’t alone. No, my friend was with me the whole time.

Me, tossing the proverbial
pebbles from some romantic play at the window of Lucius’ new apartment one
desperate, sleepless night. Hissing as loud as I could: “Lucius! I know you’re
in there!”

More pebbles, more hissing,
and then he, finally, reluctantly, opening the window. In the light pouring
out, I could see a woman behind him, blonde and young, clutching a bed sheet.

Lucius stared down at me as
if I were an anonymous beggar.

“Come down, Lucius,” I
said. “Just for a moment.”

It was a rich neighborhood,
not where one typically finds starving medical students. Not the kind of street
where any resident wants a scene.

“What do you want?” he
whispered down at me.

“Just come down. I won’t
leave until you do.”

Again, that measured stare.
Suddenly I was afraid.

He scowled and closed the
window, but a minute later he stood in the shadow of the doorway with me, his
hair disheveled, his eyes slits. He reeked of beer.

“You look like shit,” he
said to me. “You look half-dead.” Laughed at his own joke. “Do you need money?
Will that make you go away?”

Even a few days earlier
that would have hurt me, but I was too far gone to care.

“I need you to come down to
the medical school.”

“Not in a million years.
We’re done. We’re through.”

I took the arm out of my
satchel and unwrapped it from the gauze in which it writhed

Lucius backed away, against
the door, as I proffered it to him. He put out his hand to push it away,
thought better of it.

“She came back to me. I
burned the body, but the arm came back.”

“My god, what were you thinking?
Put it away. Now.”

I carefully rewrapped it,
put it back in the satchel. The point had been made.

“So you’ll help me?”

“No. Take that abomination
and leave now.”

He turned to open the door.

I said: “I need your help.
If you don’t help, I’ll go to the medical school board, show them the arm, and
tell them your role in this.” There was a wound in me because of Lucius. Part
of me wanted to hurt him. Badly.

Lucius stopped with his
hand on the doorknob, his back to me. I knew he was searching furiously for an
escape.

“You can help me or you can
kill me, Lucius,” I said, “but I’m not going away.”

Finally, his shoulders
slumped and he stared out into the night.

“I’ll help, all right? I’ll
help. But if you ever come here again after this, I’ll…”

I knew exactly what he’d
do, what he might be capable of.

***

My parents had a hard life.
I didn’t see this usually, but at times I would catch hints of it. Preservation
was a taxing combination of intuition, experimentation, and magic. It wasn’t
just the physical cost—my mother’s wrists aching from hundreds of hours
of grinding the pestle in the mortar, my father’s back throbbing from hauling
buckets out of the boat nearly every day. The late hours, the dead-end ideas
that resulted in nothing they could sell. The stress of going out in a
cockleshell of a boat in seas that could grow sullen and rough in minutes.

No, preservation came with
a greater cost than that. My parents aged faster than
normal—well-preserved, of course, even healthy, perhaps, but the wrinkles
gathered more quickly on their faces, as did the age spots I thought were acid
blotches and that they tried to disguise or hide. None of this was normal,
although I could not know it at the time. I had no other parents to compare
them to or examine as closely.

Once, I remember hearing
their voices in the kitchen. Something in their tone made me walk close enough
to listen, but not close enough to be seen.

“You must slow down,” she
said to him.

“I can’t. So many want so
much.”

“Then let them
want.
Let them go
without.”

“Maybe it’s an addiction.
Giving them what they want.”

“I want you with me, my
dear, not down in the basement of the Preservation Guild waiting for a
resurrection that will never come.”

“I’ll try…I’ll be better…”

“…Look at my hands…”

“…I love your hands…”

“…so dry, so old…”

“They’re the hands of
someone who works for a living.”

“Works too hard.”

“I’ll try. I’ll try.”

Part III

I’ll try. I’ll try. To tell
the rest of the story. To make it to the end. Some moments are more difficult
than others.

When Lucius discovered what
I planned to do, he called me crazy. He called me reckless and insane. I just
stood there and let him pace like a trapped animal and curse at me. It hardly
mattered. I was resolute in my decision.

“Lucius,” I said. “You can
make this hard or you can make this easy. You can make it last longer or you
can make it short.”

“I wish I’d never known
you,” he said to me. “I wish I’d never introduced you to my friends.”

In the end, my calm won him
over. Knowing what I had to do, the nervousness had left me. I had reached a
state so beyond that of normal human existence, so beyond what even Lucius
could imagine, that I had achieved perfect clarity. I can’t explain it any
other way. The doubt, in that moment, had fallen from me.

“So you’ll do it?” I asked
again.

“Let’s get on with it,”
Lucius growled, and I had a fleeting notion that he would kill me rather than
do it when he said, “But not at the operating theater. That’s madness. There’s
a place outside the city. A house my father owns. You will wait for me there.
I’ll get the tools and supplies I need from the school.”

Desperation, lack of sleep,
and a handful of pills Lucius had been able to steal served as my only
anesthetics. I had no idea, even with Lucius’ help, even with my knowledge of preservation
powders, if it would work. In effect, it might have been the equivalent of an
assisted suicide attempt. I lay spread out on the long dining room table of
that house while Lucius prepared his instruments, knowing that these minutes,
these seconds, might be my last among the living.

The pain was unbelievable.
I jolted in and out of consciousness to hear Lucius panting like a dog. Lucius
sawing. Lucius cursing. Lucius cutting and suturing and weeping, blood
everywhere, me delirious and singing an old nursery rhyme my mother had taught
me, Lucius bellowing his distress in counterpoint.

“I never want to see you
again,” he gasped in my ear as he finished up. “Never.”

I smiled up at him and
reached out with my good arm to touch his bloodstained face, to say “It’s all
right, Lucius. It’s going to be okay.” And: “Thank you.” The pain burned
through my skull like a wildfire. The pain was telling me I was alive.

When Lucius was done, he
slumped against the side of the table, wiping at his hands, mumbling something
I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t important. All I knew was that my own right
arm had been consigned to the morgue and the woman’s arm had replaced my own.

Lucius saw to it that I got
back to my apartment, although all I have are vague flashbacks to the inside of
a cart and a painful rolling sensation. Afterwards I spent two feverish weeks
in bed, the landlady knocking on the door every day, asking for the rent. I
think Lucius visited me to clean and check the wound, but I can’t be sure.

My memory of that time
comes and goes in phases like the tide.

***

In the end, the same
sorcery that animated the woman’s arm saved me. Over time, I healed. Over time,
my new arm learned to live with me. I worried at first about gangrene in the
place where the arm met my flesh, but I managed to prevent that. In the
mornings, I woke with it as though it was a stranger I had brought home from a
tavern. Eventually, it would wake me, stroking my forehead and touching my lips
so delicately that I would groan my passion out into its palm.

It was the beginning of my
life, in a way. A life in exile, but a life nonetheless, with a new partner.
Lucius had helped me see to that.

So it was that when I went
back to my parents’ bungalow, I had a purpose and a plan.

They met me at the door and
hugged me tight, for they hadn’t heard from me in months and I was gaunt, pale.

I did not have to tell them
everything. Or anything. I tried to hide the new arm from them, but it reached
out for my mother as though gathering in a confidante. What did it say to her,
woman to woman? What secrets did it spell into her hands? I had to look away,
as though intruding on their conversation.

“What will you do?” my
father asked.

As my mother held my new
arm, he had run a fingertip across it, come away with a preserving dust.

I wanted to say that I had
come to ask his advice, but the truth was I had only returned after I had
settled my fate. In the days, the hours, before everything had become
irrevocable, I hadn’t sought their counsel. And he knew that, knew it in a way
that filled his eyes with bewilderment, like a solution of cobalt chloride
heated to its purest color.

“What will I do?” I knew,
but I didn’t know if I could tell them.

My father had his hand on
my shoulder, as if needing support. My mother released the arm and it returned
to me and tucked its hand into my pocket, taking refuge. She had not yet said a
word to me.

I told them: “I’ve signed
on as a ship’s doctor. I’ve enough experience for that. My ship leaves for the
southern islands in three days.” The arm stirred, but only barely, like an
eavesdropper that has overheard its own name.

Lucius’ father owned the
ship. It had been Lucius’ last favor to me, freely and eagerly given. “As far
from the city as possible,” he said to me. “As far and for as long as
possible.”

My father looked crushed.
My mother only smiled bravely and said, “Three days is not enough, but it will
have to do. And you will write. And you will come back.”

Yes, I would come back, but
those three days–during which I would tell them everything, sometimes
defiant, sometimes defeated and weeping–were my last three days with
them.

***

Even in the shallow water
near the bungalow, you learn to find shapes in shadow, if you look long enough.
Staring into deep water as it speeds past and sprays white against the prow of
a large ship, the wind lacerating your face, you see even more.