House of hearts, p.17
House of Hearts, page 17
From the vitrine, the small statues watched.
Somewhere down the hall a door opened, then closed. Footsteps. Without thinking, Izzy dropped the picture, jumped up and left the room. The hall was empty, and she made it back downstairs unobserved.
“Where’s Sky?” she asked Jeb. She felt strange and wondered if the tea had something in it. But, weirdly, she was starting not to care.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “She’s just arrived. And she’s eager to see you. Ausar will take you upstairs to her.”
◆◆◆
Sky sat cross-legged on a large, low bed, its four posts carved into lotus blossoms from which hung white chiffon panels. She was admiring herself in a round hand mirror with the handle in the shape of an ankh. White roses in glass bowls had been placed around the room, white candles burned in sconces, and music—drums and flutes—whispered from hidden speakers. Sky’s unnaturally smooth and brown skin had been recently oiled like lemon-polished wood. “I’m so glad you came, darling.”
There was nowhere else to sit except the bed with Sky, so Izzy remained standing.
“Have something to drink.” Sky got up, poured another cup of tea for Izzy, handed it to her, sat down again, and adjusted the white silk robe over her thighs. Izzy doubted that the woman wore anything underneath. The inner swell of one breast was visible through the opening of her robe. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
Izzy said nothing.
“I see you’ve hurt yourself. And shaved your head.”
Izzy reflexively touched her scalp as if protecting her head from a blow.
“The journeywoman often shaves off her hair as a sign of mourning as she searches for the beloved,” Sky said. “She often becomes injured while on her quest. You intuited this. But I want to help you, so that you aren’t so alone.”
What the hell was she talking about? Was she high? Amanda had seemed high. Were they all high? Was Izzy high? “What do you know about Cyrus?”
“Do you believe in resurrection?” Sky asked then. “Because I do. I believe that in some ways the beloved is always with us.”
Izzy rubbed her temples and shook her head from side to side to clear it, but the faint buzzing remained.
“I think everything is possible,” Sky went on. “When the conditions are right. When the world is ready. Take King Tut’s pectoral breastplate for example. Howard Carter, who discovered his tomb, thought the greenish gold gem, used to make the large scarab carrying the sun and moon, was chalcedony, ordinary quartz. But then minerals like lechatelierite and baddeleyite and also iron, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and iridium were discovered in the material. The greenish yellow material was made by a meteorite hitting earth, burning the sand, then cooling in the air and showering down on the desert.
“We are all sharing the earth’s pain,” said Sky.
The words the child had spoken, the child from Bombay Beach. They snapped Izzy back. “Why did you visit Cyrus when he was a kid? His mom said a woman with long black hair used to come around their house. Why did those kids play that video?” And: “What did you do to Cyrus?”
“Do you believe in resurrection?” Sky repeated. “Do you believe in rebirth and renewal? Perhaps your love lives on in some other way.”
“He was killed,” Izzy said “Cyrus. Chopped up into pieces.” She had said it aloud at last. Was she screaming?
“I’m so sorry,” Sky said. “We will try to help any way we can. I know how horrible this must be for you.”
“You don’t know me,” Izzy said.
Sky’s eyes shone in the candlelight. They looked, Izzy thought, familiar somehow. The white roses in the vase nearest her were rimmed in a thin line of red, as if they had been carefully dipped in blood. “I do, though,” Sky said.
“No.” Izzy’s mouth had gone dry again, her head hurt, she couldn’t think.
“I know you and I know him,” Sky said. “You loved each other and—” Then she paused, and her eyes glazed over, looked somehow blind. “You are both my children. All four of you are my children.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted children; that was all I wanted,” Sky said. “But not just any children. Children who could change the planet, make everything right again. I knew I could make this happen if I birthed four children, two boys and two girls. And I did! Twice.”
Izzy restrained herself, twisting her hands. They felt as if they belonged to someone else.
“You remind me of myself at your age,” Sky said. “So fierce. So angry but also so full of love. I was poor, too, like you; I didn’t have anything but my body. But I thought, this body is connected to some higher power, something sacred, and it can bring needed souls into the world. Children who can change the world! I will birth them and scatter some of them around the desert and then they will find each other and play out the myth as it is meant to be.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The last four children, Osiris, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys, have the same father. With the four of you, each father was different, I promise, your real fathers—Del and Larry and Richard and Otis. They didn’t know about each other. Cyrus’s mother never knew about me, either, and Richard’s wife left, but your mothers—yours and Nephy’s—went along with it. Maybe they believed in me, or maybe they just didn’t believe in themselves, didn’t want to lose their men after the miscarriages. A woman in today’s world has to find ways to feed herself.”
“What the fuck?” Izzy said again. How did Sky know the names of all four of their fathers—not just Cyrus’s but Izzy’s and Seth’s and Nephy’s?
“Cyrus found me. And yes, she was with him. But you were the one he loved. He was just trying to understand himself, and he got lost along the way. I didn’t know what would happen. I just let it all play itself out. And when I heard about your meeting at Bombay Beach, I asked the little ones to play the video to bring you to me.
The room spun and blurred, and Izzy steadied herself against the wall. “What? What’s in this?” She threw the cup of tea onto the tiled floor, and it shattered.
“Lotus tea. To relax us. Sometimes thought of as a slight aphrodisiac. A little bit of opium to help with the pain,” Sky said. “You might hallucinate slightly.”
In Izzy’s mind: the framed photo of herself at thirteen with Larry and Izzy who so little resembled her mother. As a child, when they were all in the car on the highway, Izzy would imagine Leanne screaming at Larry to pull over to the side of the road and telling Izzy to get out. “You’re not mine,” she’d hear Leanne say. It was both fear and fantasy. Now it was only fear she felt. Because if she was not Leanne’s, then whose was she? That woman. From the movie. She used to watch him play, Jody had said. You are all my children, Sky had said. But how? And why? And what did this have to do with the fact that Cyrus had been murdered and dismembered? It was too much to fathom at once, but it meant—it meant something. Something unspeakable.
“I’m going to help you,” said Sky, her voice a metronome, casting its spell. “At midnight in the courtyard. I will help you understand the key to becoming yourself.”
What was the scent of darkness? Izzy wondered, as she drifted into the smoke of sleep.
◆◆◆
When Izzy came back to consciousness, her mouth even drier now as if she’d been sucking on linen, she was lying outside on a divan, looking up at the ultraviolet of an early evening sky. Black shapes swooped above her—a formation of birds. Hieroglyphs, she found herself thinking. She heard the glass-bead-tinkling of a fountain. Smelled fire in the air. Burning minerals.
Bare-armed and bare-legged, the cool of satin light on her thighs, someone had taken off her clothes, put her in underwear—lace underwear?—and a dress. A satin dress. White. The fabric caught lightly on her rough hands. She was aware of all of this but unable to fully respond or react.
“He was born in the desert,” a man’s voice said. Jeb’s voice. “His mother laid herself out upon his father, the earth, her belly a great blue egg speckled with stars. His father impregnated her with his trees and his mountains, his fields of wheat stalks and corn. He and his sisters and his brother burst forth in the light of their grandfather Sun, the maker of all, the bright dung beetle in the sky, the golden scarab, the all-seeing eye.
“He and his sister-wife Isis bathed in the lotus pool, anointed each other’s pulses with fragrant oil of myrrh and frankincense, adorned each other’s brows with garlands, adorned each other’s eyes with lapis, tourmaline, and emerald, adorned each other’s lips and hearts with carnelian, adorned each other’s skin with gold. Hummingbirds thrummed at their necks and wrists. Butterflies flew from their lips when they opened their mouths. Their scapulae sprouted wings. They let the wild flowers grow unfettered. Bees hummed in their hive and it sang like a lyre.
“He and his wife went forth hand-in-hand to irrigate dry land, to plant wheat and corn, to weave fine linen and make barley beer and date wine. They were not wasteful. They burned the wick all night and wasted no light. Draped in white linen and gauze, she knelt before him and offered her breasts and her thighs like cakes of saffron and honey. He offered her his cow’s horn, his stalk of wheat, his golden staff.”
The words had bound and drowned Izzy, seeped into her pores, as if they had been spoken directly to her. But she could not let them rule her. She tried to rouse herself, but she could not. The man’s voice continued:
“When you create, you sacrifice a little of yourself, a little of your seed, a small blue egg. When two bodies struggle against each other in the war of love, a child may be conceived. Children are small deities, slick with blood as they arrive in this world. When you paint a story on the temple wall, you lose a little blood. But when you are done, you will walk the flower path dripping with hyacinth, fragrant with calamus, unfurling the blue lotus in the silver pool; you will go forth into the flower fields of peace.
“You were born to make beauty in the slaughterhouse of the world. You were born to toil. You were born to love. Offer yourself up to the light of the golden eye of the sun, to the silver mouth of the moon, to the gods and goddesses of love. The god and goddess reside within, but do not forget them in others. Gather your passions like precious gems, polish and refine them and give them to the world. Loss is inevitable, but do not fear it. It is the corpse without its stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver. But these organs wait in canopic jars to be reclaimed in the afterlife. Only the heart remains. It is the hope that allows light and love to flood and enter the void. Live with hope, with imagination and purpose.
“Osiris said, ‘I have been imperfect. I have overlooked the goddess in my home. I have been lustful and full of fear. I have been ignorant. I have neglected the earth, I have neglected my beloved, and I have neglected myself. I have forgotten to kiss the dough and honey from my loved one’s fingers, kiss her lips and hair in the blue dawn. I have listened to death singing in the courtyard and longed to go to her—lusted for her like a lover.’
“‘See me,’” Jeb continued. “‘I am Osiris, imperfect, but bringing light to the darkness, bringing water back to the desert. I am Osiris seduced by a sibyl-sister, night lady with her eyes like a panther’s, her lips smeared in ox blood, her cloven hooves. I am Osiris rendered by a brother with his terrible snout, his self-mutilations blamed on the gods. I am Osiris, gathered up by a sorceress wife, with her eyes like grapes, her mouth like a pomegranate, her hair like a falcon’s wings, her sex like a fig, her skin redolent of hyacinth, of olives and honey. I am Osiris resurrected by a son with the head of a hawk. He will be raped, his eyes plucked out by his murderous demon uncle. Everything that is lost returns. I have shed my skin and bones like a cloak of rags, but my heart remains intact like a lotus beating in a jar. I will return. I will return.’”
Izzy tried to speak but found she could not.
“Don’t be afraid,” Sky said, coming into Izzy’s line of vision, leaning forward. “Every act of creation requires sacrifice. Art, sex, they all require giving up something of the body, of the self. Again and again the god is sacrificed so that he may arise again.” She wore a long white dress, cut low to reveal her collarbones and a necklace of carnelian, lapis, and gold. Gold and glass bracelets chimed at her wrists. “I want to help you,” Sky said.
“Help,” Izzy managed.
“All that matters is that you are here now.”
Izzy kept trying and trying to speak.
“I’m going to help you,” Sky said again.
Then Izzy smelled the narcotic mix of resin, honey, and white roses. Falling into the deepening violet light, she wondered what it would be like for all her thoughts to stop.
◆◆◆
Izzy opened her eyes. More time had passed. The sky hung, dark-amethyst now, over the garden.
“Why do we worship Isis?” a woman’s voice asked. Sky’s voice again.
Izzy realized that she had not moved for some time, that she could hardly move.
Jeb, dressed in black, stood beside Sky. The group had gathered by the waterfall. The night was colder now and clear. Izzy still lay, clothed in white satin, on the divan.
Over her hovered a man with the face of a bird—a falcon?—and another jackal-faced man. A cow woman with horns, a wet, black nose, a round, pink tongue hanging lasciviously from the cleft of her mouth. Her heavy head bobbed like a puppet’s, and her arms were painted with flowers. A tall man, who resembled some animal with long furry ears and a snout, stood in the shadows.
“Why would the ancients follow her?” Sky asked. “A woman? A beautiful woman who could make love magic, vegetal magic, make plants grow, who could weave baskets and linen, make the waters rise and the evening star shine, who devoted her life to her husband, the king; a woman who gathered her beloved’s bones and gave him immortality. Who wouldn’t want that? And then she was abolished, sent away, underground. There she lived on and now we look to her again, in times of such great need.
“The girls and women raped and murdered. The guns shooting down our Black men in cold blood on the streets. Shooting our children in classrooms! The refusal to regulate these weapons. Nature rebelling. Ice melting, animals dying. It’s like the apocalypse, truly. But did the goddess ever really leave? How many people go to psychics and hear, ‘You were an Egyptian king or queen reincarnated?’ Why not a plumber? Why not a beggar?” Laughter frothed like the waterfall hitting the pool. “No, an Egyptian king or queen. That’s the message, over and over again. Because, within, we all are these Egyptian kings and queens, descendants of the gods and goddesses.
“And what are we doing here tonight?” Sky asked. “Trying to get you to assimilate the deities, to appreciate the feminine, to honor and restore her, so that the masculine, the powerful, good, kind-hearted king, can be restored to the throne as well.” Sky raised her hand, beckoning, and the cow-woman stepped forward.
“Hathor, will you recite the invocation?” Sky asked.
The woman began to speak.
Re-membering Deities
Isis and Osiris, they were twins.
They loved each other even in the womb.
His brother Set chopped off Osiris’s limbs.
She turned to falcon, raised him from the tomb.
From Isis’s womb the child named Horus came.
Then, to avenge his father, he did go.
But Set was strong and raped and blinded him.
From Horus’s eyes the lotuses will grow.
In pity, Isis freed Set from his bonds.
In anger, Horus severed off her head.
Replaced it with a cow’s beneath the fronds.
Then Horus raised his father from the dead.
Like Isis I’m beheaded, Horus-blind.
Osiris I re-member, Set re-minds.
The words fell around Izzy like a shower of chilly petals. She could not quite catch them all.
The woman retreated.
Amanda?
Izzy tried to walk back through the lines of the poem.
Sky turned and looked at her. “Aurora, will you sit up, please.”
It took Izzy a moment to recognize her name; then, as if hypnotized, she did as Sky asked.
Sky fastened a white papier-mâché mask over Izzy’s face and tied it in the back with a ribbon. The mask fit too well, as if it had been made for her. Izzy tried to breathe normally through the tiny nostril openings; she stared out of the ragged eyeholes into the crowd of masked people.
“You will portray Isis this evening,” Sky said. “And you—” She beckoned.
A dark-haired man with an eerily smooth white face came forward. Izzy gasped out loud. It was Ever. He was here. What was he doing? What were they doing to him? Why was his face like that?
“You will portray Osiris,” Sky said. She lit a stick of incense on the candle flame and held it aloft. “Bless us as we enact the mystery of Isis and Osiris,” she said.
Jeb stepped forward holding a sistrum that he shook lightly. “Lament with us. Osiris is dead! Dismembered by his brother, Set.” He blew out the candles in the courtyard, one by one, until the only light came from the almost-full December Moon—the moon called Cold.
“Dismembered…” Izzy whispered. What were they talking about? What had happened? Dismembered…like Cyrus… By his brother, Set, like… She struggled to sit up, but she was too weak.
“Osiris saw the beautiful chest painted with wondrous images and lay down in it. But the chest had been made by his brother Set, made to Osiris’s dimensions, and so he lay in it and died.”
Sky said, “Now Osiris lives only in Isis’s dreams.” Izzy was shaking like the sistrum, now. She smelled more roses—always roses—and frankincense. “Repeat after me,” Sky whispered.
