“You are a hopeless romantic, Mr. Faulk.”
“Oh, what’s it all worth without that, Mr. Henry?”
He tried to hand the ticket back to me. I shook my head. “Keep them both. If someone asks, I won’t know which direction you went.”
He stuffed the tickets into his pocket, picked up his battered suitcase, and melted into the crowd.
I left.
FOUR
I had told him the truth: I wasn’t going anywhere. There was nowhere to go. Not back to the hotel. Not to Lilly’s. Not to von Helrung’s brownstone. Not to the Society. I had been cast adrift and, rudderless, let the human tide of the great city take me where it would.
I could not recall when last I had eaten anything, but I was not hungry. When had I slept? I was not tired. I bobbed along the late-evening crowd like an empty bottle floating in a vast and featureless sea.
Everything was perfect, down to this latest instance, until you butted your head where it didn’t belong.
Yes, Dr. Warthrop, and that raises the question as to where my head might belong.
I had a vague notion to return to the narrow street where the woman had called down to me. Perhaps if I lay with her I would not feel so rudderless and empty.
Even the most chaste of kisses . . .
And the Sibyl answered, I would die.
The light changed from yellow to crimson, and a dragon soared above paper lanterns of red and gold. The smell of fish and ginger and acrid smoke, and the staccato bursts of their mother tongue and the pure darkness of their eyes against the sallow skin: I had wandered into Chinatown.
The street was too crowded; I turned off at the first intersection I reached and left the garish light behind. A woman stepped out of a doorway.
“You come, yes? Come.”
She urged me into the doorway. Two young girls sat upon a wooden bench in the little vestibule. The girls were both American like the woman, though they were wearing red cheongsams embroidered with dragons. They stood up and came to me, each taking an arm. They were beautiful. I allowed them to lead me through a curtain into a dimly lit room heavy with smoke. My eyes watered; my stomach turned. I rolled upon a smoky, nauseating sea.
“What is this place?” I asked the girl clinging to my right arm.
I could not see any walls. The room seemed to stretch to infinity. I could make out vague, humanlike forms inclined on mattresses and cots or blanket-covered benches, dozens of them, some lying in pairs, but most alone, lolling like lotus-eaters, eyes roaming beneath fluttering lids. My thoughts would not hold: I felt them dissipate, half-formed, into the murky air.
The girls eased me down onto an empty mattress. It crackled beneath us, filled with straw.
“Opium,” I said to the girl sitting on my left. “Isn’t it?”
She smiled at me. Her face was delicate, her eyes large and dark. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her companion—sister? They looked very much alike—removed a long, thin pipe from a nook in the wall and prepared the bowl.
“Would you like to try?” the girl asked.
Her sister was warming the bowl over an open flame. I watched her for a moment, and said, “What I would really like is something indescribably euphoric—orgasmic, for lack of a better word.”
“You will like it,” the girl answered. “What is your name?”
“Pellinore,” I answered.
Her sister pressed the pipe into my hand. The girl cupped my hand in hers and brought the stem to my mouth.
“Breathe hard and deep, Pellinore,” she murmured. “As deep as you can, and let it out slowly, very slowly, through your nose.”
“Don’t leave me,” I said.
I inhaled deeply. My stomach heaved in protest, but I held my breath as time stretched to the point of snapping, like a fishing line pulled too taut, and the girl’s face expanded, her dark eyes overwhelming my vision.
“It is irrevocable,” she said. “Like the fruit from Eden’s tree.”
And from my other side, her sister: “Once it’s tasted, there is no going back. More begets desire for more—and more, and more.”
“What would you?” the first sister asked.
“I would die,” I answered.
Her face had swollen to the size of the earth. Her pupils were as large as the continents. Her lips parted like tectonic plates splitting apart, revealing a chasm a hundred miles across and immeasurably deep.
“The most chaste of kisses,” she said, and her breath was sweet like the exhalations of spring.
“Lilly,” I said.
“Do not be chaste,” Lilly answered, and I kissed her. I tumbled through her atmosphere, infinitesimally small, and the heat of my entry scorched the skin from my bones and the bones from my marrow until I was no larger than a grain of sand, white-hot and falling, my corruption burned away in her unsullied ether.
I would die, Lilly, I would die.
Die, then, in me.
FIVE
I am uncontained.
There is no place where I am not.
I am a circle and a circle is perfect.
I am the primordial egg at the moment the chrysalis breaks.
I am the amber eye looking at you and I am you looking back at me.
I am das Ungeheuer. Turn around.
I am salvation. I am contagion. I am perfection.
Like the beast its skin, I have sloughed off the human coil. There is no limit to me and so there is no you.
This is the secret I keep:
I am das Ungeheuer.
Turn around.
The world boils. The angry red sun fills half the sky. Blood-colored light crashes into the cracked earth, the dead earth, the desert earth, the greenless scorched broken earth.
No living thing, but I remain, unbroken, purified darkness. I am the darkness and I am perfect.
What would you? Would you die?
Turn around. I am there, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. I am always there. I am the faceless thing you cannot name, the nameless thing you cannot face.
I am your abhorrent desire, the arms that embrace you, the womb you flee.
Do you begin to see? Do you start to understand? I will strip your skin with my teeth. I will drain your blood by pinpricks. I will grind your bones to dust with a pebble. I will pluck you apart one atom at a time.
Why do you pretend? You know what I am. Why do you not turn around?
The world will end in bloody light on broken ground, but I will go on and on, everlasting chrysalis forever splitting open.
Everything is a circle and a circle is perfect.