XXXII.
Tetsuwon waits for me while I go to change my sack
for glad rags as instructed. But I get
to my cupboard and look at those dresses hung memento mori all of
them sHe went with
me to buy, those which sHe watched me try on and advised which sHe
billed and cooed to
see me wear out on the town, the celebratory robes for the wooing of
the paeons of publication,
they smell of him, reek of her.
My first book now in print which I called Real
Dreams was renamed Centauric Visions which I
do not like I say aloud to the dresses as I touch their sleeves in
turn. Of course I am not wise
enough yet to have my pronouncements named for my heroine the Sphinx
I say pulling out
the one sHe loved best the one of deepest intense blue the azure of
my eyes to light by the color
of the fabric's fire on mine, blue on blue heartache on heartache
sung to myself as I drop it over
my head to let parts of the threads' glow which touch my face be
dulled to yet darker traces by
sudden springs eternal from those electric eyes.
Yes? I turn and check the mirror. It is still me.
I am still beautiful. But what? The sight of meat
and bone and skin and hair however wonderfully sculpted now somehow
disgusts me. I see
myself on the vivisector's table. As I saw my brothers and
sisters.
"You seem troubled," he says when I appear.
"Ahhhmm. I am remembering. Usually I don't. I
don't because I have a good memory, you see,
I don't remember because I don't want to. It hurts."
"Your childhood?" he asks.
"I don't want to. I don't know about my father. My
many sisters and brothers, though.
Some of us escaped. Where are they now? My mother, was it my mother?
I was orphaned
by the master who then took care of me. Before then I don't want to
remember."
"Master?" he asks.
"SHe took care of me. I know things have finished
and they can't hurt me now,
but they do if I remember. So... I don't..."
"I've heard this technique called 'repression' by some theorists," he says brightly.
"Yes," I nod, "I read it that word in one of master's books."
"Master?" he says again.
"I was orphaned, now I am abandoned. It is making
me remember things. Things I don't want to,"
I tell him frowning.
"Ah yes, growing pains, " he replies nodding
happily, "it's bound to hurt. Suffering, yes,
everybody's afflicted you know. It's quite normal, now and again
anyway. But then, there
are ways of..." He trails off and looks at me as if he can hear the
sickening waves passing
up my body from my stomach through the throat and out of my
ears.
"I am severed," I say to him frowning, "hacked and
torn in two. I am in many unfamiliar pieces.
The floor beneath my feet uneven and unstable."
" I know," he says and proceeds to squint his eyes
so narrowly that they seem to emerge between
the tight silk lids as two pools of black mercury contained alive.
"Ah yes, I have it -" he says suddenly, frowning,
"When the Gods first created men and women
they were born with four legs, four arms and two heads, each looking
in opposite directions affixed
to the one neck. But men and women became so self satisfied that the
Gods punished them by
cleaving them asunder. Since then, both halves have spent their whole
lives frantically running about
the earth in search of the other half."
"Yes, I am thinking of leaving here now. Who wrote that story?" I ask.
"I don't know. But it was a favorite myth for the
ancient Greeks I believe. It's a story to explain
things to children. You know."
"Fairy tales, yes. I wrote some once. Your nephew, he liked the one I read him."
"Well, the ending of this Greek one isn't so
encouraging, that's all. The morals are very primitive
and unevolved. This splitting thing is actually a very positive
metaphor for growth and development.
Discrimination is the first step. You know, you have to be able to
tell things apart, then see them in a
new arrangement. The separation of male and female elements is
necessary, they must become
whole in themselves before they can profitably be married into a new
whole. Elementary
psychology I'm told."
"Excuse me," I say a little rudely, thinking that
he is beginning to sound a little like the master on a
good day, "Can we go out soon and talk on the way?"
"Oh, I was lecturing you, so sorry," he says his
hand on the back of his neck and laughing like the
bird pleased with itself for having woken up for the sun.