1. How I descended to the underworld and failed to save my beloved
I lost her.
Fire followed her footsteps, crackled in her black hair. Her skin was bronze; her eyes, perfectly white. She stretched and hinted at a smile. She licked her lips; they shone with spit. She had me; she descended; I followed.
She paid me no mind, walked loose-limbed, whistling. At evening, I stood at the periphery of her smoky fire while she prepared a stew of mothwing, smothered starlight, unclean meat. She threw the cracked bones in the fragrant bushes. I stood sentry, vigilant for I don’t know what.
When she arose in the grey light before the sun, my muscles were stiff, my hair hung in strings, my throat was raw, tasting of flint and shale. But I dragged after her, too greedy to resist. I have always gotten what and whom I wanted. She was so here and there.
I was an animal bereft of sweet food. I licked the wind, I would pollinate her with the germ of my desire. At the horizon, where land and sky rub bellies in the haze, she stepped between them and with my eyes I followed, I followed. She did not look back.
My feet were rooted in the soil. My eyes were stone; my soul, sand. In I breathed the good decay, loam and crumble, bone and wood. The sun baked my hair; withering above, I was submerged.
I swam the sluggish currents of the earth. In among the burrows of the grubs and silverfish, scorpions and oil, holding in the circle of myself the fire and air of the rarified sky. She had breathed it out, given herself wholly to the drip and susurration of the settling clay, the grind and groan, sigh and split of rock on rock.
I touched her; she didn’t protest, couldn’t; all her soft parts hardened, petrified. I could have had her then, might have held her stiff and unresisting.
I was more than generous. I ate six grains of sand, six red berries, six silver snails swallowed whole. But I wouldn’t free that final breath. The nautilus of my organs chambered my feast, smoothed the irritation, glazed each bead in its own hard center. Nacre; margarita; alba; luster of Tarshish; the ground around me murmured with the words for pearl. And she didn’t move, and she didn’t turn.
Her fossil teeth were bitten deeply into mud, semi-circle, hieroglyph of her absence, a forgotten artifact. She was happy there. She liked it, still and slow, held from all sides in the earth’s cool womb. No rescue could offer more. And so I left, half dragging my heels in the clouded earth.
2. How I wed myself, and after
I have always been a scholar and my life solitary, full of dust and time, derision, fruitless effort. A scholar’s demands are many, our patience scant, and brooking no intrusion. For these and other reasons, I wed myself, first seen in oases’ shallow pools, scorched sand at my feet, grit in my eyes.
I was all that I could ask for. I was a helpmeet to myself, living and awake, in the warmth of constant communion.
One day I walked out to make a study from nature. I passed though the desert, runnels of sand curling over my toes, the dry breezes caressing each strand of my hair. At last I saw the mountains, and walking further, finally arriving there, I stared at their massive self-importance, their sour satisfaction.
I entered the cool deep caves. A shaft of sunlight burst upon the smooth and inky waters. Then I saw myself, so still, customarily quiet. It scared me. I stamped my feet. I yelled. And I stamped my feet but where there should have been a yell, full-throated and hoarse, there was only the drowned mouth filled with water, throat choked with unscreamed screams.
White fish floated above me, bloated and eyeless, pale fins glided through my flesh. I knew I was betrayed. I smashed the water with my feet and fists, splashed up the silky pool that mocked me with this ghost of myself, incorporeal and glideable-through. The blind clear fish had fled to their crevices. I was alone, soaked to the bone.
3. A tale of babies switched at birth
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to be. In the instant of my birth, in a flicker of scales and brine I gushed into my father’s hands, feigned human flesh. But I was feeble and he was clever, so in the still hours before dawn, while mother lay in exhausted sleep, he replaced me with a better baby, which he constructed from oak and broom. While he worked, great yellow beetles swarmed my crib, balanced me in their delicate pincers and returned me to the glistening river.
I was clever in the wavelets, frolicked in the pleasant saltiness of the slow river at the mouth of the sea. I flung myself above the skin of water, too far and not far enough for a different kind of safety. Netted in myrtle, thick odor of rose, clover, sunlight clung to me. My frenzy slowed, the voluptuous debauched squirm of carapace on skin. Flipped glittering in the gold air I fluttered out my hard, dry plumage, flapped and glided to my birth-home, perched on the window’s hard, dry sill.
He was there, the vegetable imposter, grown to manhood, violet-eyed, his lips curved in pretty smiles. I gave him back a mirror of his grin, twined up his muscled leg, licked his knees, his groin, his salty armpits and his flower of a mouth. The more I licked, the happier he was. His cheeks lost their bloom and his lips their blush. I swelled with him, sucked the last drops from the corners of his eyes, and when I had him all I chewed the crumpled paper of his skin, flicking my tongue on the splintery wood, tasted the air for the last of his scent.
I was happy. I left my room and walked downstairs for supper. I sat in my place at the table, fiddled with the berries and plums in their wooden bowl. Father’s face dulled like an old coin. Mother clenched her jaw, I saw the muscles jump, and set a plate before me. I wasn’t hungry. I grinned at them both, hands on my full belly, smiled the sun through the false boy’s purple eyes.
I settled to my true life, the one meant for me. Days I lay in the tall, saw-bladed grass, sniffed the crushed onion and sage, catching insects on my tongue and slurping them slowly down my throat. Nights I shat gold and made a comfortable nest in the corner of my room. In their separate beds, my parents had the same bad dream, that their exiled selves flapped and crawled and clawed toward the little house to gobble up what was theirs.
But after the first pleasure, I am no longer contented. I was corrupted by my youth. I long for the poisonous cradle, the murderous flop-flopping, the gasp for air. To fling myself outward, armored and boned, soul in its own fire! But I have destroyed the fish-boy as surely as the boy with lips of rose. Alas, I am born new, full, soft, fearful, satiated, snake in my own mouth.
I have lost him. The dance of the virgin. Cruelty.
4. Adjacent to the King of the Demons
The dream was repetitive, but clear enough, and insistent. I was writing a short story in which a djinn or imp, perhaps named Ashmodel, kept taking over my keyboard to type its name or trying to possess me, force me to type it myself. If completed, this act would call the creature from its reality to my own. In the dream, in the dream, I frantically stabbed at the space bar each time this sequence played out, again and again spoiling the summons that would unleash and wrench him here.
I woke abruptly. That name, I knew, was not biblical, not an angel or dervish in my own religious tradition. In the Talmud, the wrathful King of the Demons is Ashmedai, a linguistic corruption whirled from the Persian, a deuterocanonical devil of lust. Was this dream dervish an ifrit once seated adjacent to its sovereign, now unbound and bounding from Zarathustra to Solomon to me, gardens to deserts to cool coast of the Salish Sea? Or was this Ashmedai himself, his avatar? Did I remember the name correctly as I lined up my evidence and argument like a good yeshiva bokher? Would I have to save this world?
I flew down the stairs, wrenched open my laptop, and in a spasm typed ASHMODEL—