The Mirrors Page 4

  The snake laughs a deep, dry, guttural laugh. More like the laugh one would imagine coming out of a dragon. He looks at one of the naked, hanging children. A boy, blue and gasping for breath. “Is this what Hell calls ‘protection,’ demon?”

  I want to object to his name-calling. I am not a demon. But besides that, he does seem to have a point. I blush and extend my hand toward little boy blue and his kin. “All this isn’t my fault. The foreman says that if I cut even one of them down to ease their suffering, I will be cast out of Hell and into The Dark!”

  The snake smiles. “The Dark, eh? I see no Dark. I only see sun and leaves and hanging children.”

  Exasperated, I sigh and part the branches so that he can see the black void off in the distance, open like the maw of a beast. “If I’m cast out into The Dark, I will cease to exist!”

  The snake laughs louder and longer than before. So long and loud his body spasms, shaking the tree. Almost shaking me out of it. When he is through he looks at me. “Is that what they tell you?”

  My stomach drops. I don’t like being laughed at. I don’t like the uncertainty he introduces. I don’t like how he insinuates that my foreman is a liar. But even though I am a minion of Hell, some residue of self-will can’t help finding the possibility of escape appealing.

  But another part of me—some part of my humanity lurking deep, deep in the marrow of my bones—tells me the serpent lies. Still, I’m intrigued. I tell myself that it’s better to know my enemy than to be ignorant of him. I tell myself that if I listen to the lie the snake tells me, then I know the snake a little better.

  “What is The Dark, then, if not a void?”

  “My home. The hole in which I burrow each night. I am the serpent of beginnings and ends. The ancients of your race called me many names. Tiamat, Ouroboros, just to name two.”

  “You go into The Dark and do not cease to exist?”

  “What is existence?” the snake says.

  “I don’t understand that question.”

  “Your kind never will. Allow me to elucidate. I cannot guarantee what would happen if you were to venture into my den. There might be a whole other world awaiting you there, where you never suffer and stay forever young. Or perhaps my hole would be the snuffer that would extinguish the flame of your consciousness. Or it could be that I would just eat you once you got in there, and the ‘you’ would cease to exist and become a part of me. A part of eternity. Who knows? For all my importance, I am just a snake—a player in this play just like you. I did not write the script.”

  I know the snake has to be lying. It knows what happens when men and women enter The Dark. Surely, it knows whether or not it will eat me. It knows, but answers in riddles.

  “Just stay away from me,” I tell him. “And stay away from the whole orchard, while you’re at it!”

  “I will do nothing of the sort. I will eat one hanging child each day, and one each night.” With that he rears up, widening his jaws to the point of dislocation, and begins devouring the blue boy, feet first. The lad makes whimpering sounds, like a cornered rabbit. I look away. I start to descend the ladder. When I reach the bottom, I tell my fellow laborer that I am finished with that tree and we should move on.

  “Are you sure you’re up to it, sir?” he says. “You look as though you’ve seen the Devil himself.”

  The foreman looks in my direction as though he, too, suspects I am shaken. I just look down at the ground.

  It’s a scorching June afternoon in Hell. The sun hovers right overhead, so that the hanging trees offer only stingy shade. I linger by the trunk to stay cool. I look up and appreciate how my careful pruning and watering have led to the bounty I see dangling above me.

  The fruit have already ripened into young bucks and maidens. They try to loosen their nooses to no real avail. Just as they have grown, so has the rope—thick as an actual hangman’s noose now, and just as tight on their necks as in earlier months.

  Occasionally, some of them briefly succeed in clearing a tiny space between the noose and their neck, and manage to vent their rage against me. They call me “fool” when they aren’t calling me “demon.” There’s a blonde up there, just dangling by her noose, who is screaming herself hoarse. She is attractive, having grown tan up there, naked and baked each day by Hell’s sun. Her breasts sway as she rocks back and forth on the creaking branch. She screams in her ragged voice that I must save her to save myself.

  I am a practical man who knows there is no salvation. The onyx slab says so. The foreman says so. My fellow laborers say so. They say it, I believe it; that settles it. The serpent plays dumb, but I suspect even he knows we are right.

  I do not believe saving her will save me. But I do suspect she can be provide me some benefit. As I consider that, I feel an almost-foreign stirring below my belt. I can’t remember how long it has been since I’ve had a release. It seems as if it has been ages since I’ve even wanted release. But now I do. For the first time in Hell that I can recall, I yearn for it and have a plan for getting it.

  And, for once, all this work seems worth it. Let her call me “demon,” as long as she says it on her back, with her legs spread.

  Perhaps noticing my distraction, the foreman approaches me. “I hear noises up there day and night,” he says. “I think we have a pest damaging our harvest. How are the fruit?”

  I tell him all is well, but that I’ll be glad to check it out. I say this, perhaps for the first time, semi-sincerely. I will be glad to examine the fruit. Or at least the lovely.

  He seems satisfied by the answer, and that makes me relax. But I am worried by the possibility that he, like the serpent, knows more than he’s saying. Maybe he knows about the serpent and expects me to tell him about it, as some test of my honesty and devotion. It has been up there for a month now. It has eaten some fruit. One by day, one by night, each day, each night—just as he said he would. But there are thousands of hanging fruits in the orchard. With that rate of success, he’s more worm than dragon, ruining relatively few trees here and there. A pest (as the foreman said), no more. Even with him here, Hell’s work goes on unimpeded.

  I grab my pruning saw, have my assistant help me with the ladder, and decide to climb up to the lovely. She and I need to have a chat.

  Although she hangs lower than most fruit, her branch is still higher than my reach at the top of the ladder. Undaunted, I climb the tree itself until I arrive at her place on it. I smile, holding out the saw.

  I look her over. The perspiration pours off her brow and onto her breasts. It drips off her nipples, down her belly, and drenches her sex. I know it’s just sweat, but I like to imagine that she’s aroused. Ready to use. Wanting me as much as I want her. I am able to ignore, for the moment, the noose. Able to ignore her choking.

  Maybe she detects my lust. She takes her dainty hands up to her noose and pulls it away for just a moment. “Demon,” she hisses, “save me and save yourself. You are dam—”

  I ignore her, the way I always ignore fruit. I run my hands through her light, soft hair. I let my fingers—now calloused from all the orchard work—graze her neck. I cup her breasts. Jiggle them. She takes her hands away from the noose and tries smacking and clawing me away. I just move down to her crotch and, when she smacks my hands away from there, her ass.

  She makes loud, choking whimpers.

  “Shhh,” I tell her. “I’ll save you all right. Save you for later!” I grin.

  On the way down a jury of fruit—bystanders to my flirtation with the blonde—cast judgments on me. “Demon! Rapist!”

  I know in my heart that I’m neither. I didn’t even have the opportunity.

  It’s night and the orchard is cool. It takes me twice as long to haul the ladder out from the shed alone than it would with my assistant, but no one can know what I’ll do tonight. I don’t think what I’m doing is against the rules. Yes, I plan to cut her down, but I’ll find a way to hang her back up when I’m done. I’m just not sure if the foreman would approve, and
I don’t want to take any chances.

  The hanging fruit flail in summertime. All their kicking and gasping makes the leaves rustle. A good thing, too. My movement in the tree might be overheard if they weren’t moving all the time.

  The full moon glows red, as it always does in Hell. Even up in the branches, it isn’t hard to find her. After spending time with her earlier in the day, I think I can smell her. She sees me and starts bucking her body backward, then lets herself go forward as though to make herself into a hanging projectile.

  She misses, and on the backswing I grab her. My heart pounds in my chest, and for a moment I am unsure if I am truly dead and damned or, rather, alive. It sure feels like the latter.

  I hold her tight and kiss her swollen lips. “Look, I’m going to cut you down off of here. The least you can do is grant me one favor.”

  She stops fighting.

  I cut her noose. Damn, I did it. It sways on the branch in the aftermath of our tussle. It’s strange seeing the noose without a choking fruit in it.

  She coughs and clears her throat. Her voice sounds raspy, brittle, and about to break. “You don’t understand, you fool. You demon. You don’t understand this is all … all just a test! Let me go to The Dark. Follow me there. It will be …” More coughing. “It will be your salvation.”

  I stop. I look at her. I now remember the story. The old story. The serpent convinced the woman. Then the woman convinced the man. And then they were, both of them, exiled from Eden. I will not be led by this wily tart into non-existence. I exist. Not only exist—thrive! I will continue to exist, her wiles notwithstanding. “You’ve been deceived, woman. Come, let me plow some truth into you.”

  She screams and screams again and jumps off the tree. “You cruel bastard. You deserve it!” She lands, I hear bones crack. I see her figure twisted in unnatural angles.

  I see a shadow-projectile dart through the rose-tinted night. I see fangs glint in the moonlight. I see its jaws widen around her feet. I see a tail sweep back and hit my ladder, almost knocking it to the ground. I gasp and begin to race down. I cannot be left up here. I would be mocked. I can’t let myself be mocked. Not a man in my position.

  “Let the serpent take you!” the woman screams. “Let him take you back to The Dark, or just run there yourself. It’s almost too late.”

  Lights come on in the quarters. There is a clamor. The snake has devoured her up to her hips now. Now up to her neck. Now she’s in, and her cries stop. Now he slithers off toward The Dark.

  Now the foreman comes out of his quarters. “Tell me, son, what’s the meaning of all this.”

  “The woman in the tree … the serpent told her to go to The Dark. And she told me to go to The Dark. But I didn’t.”

  He looks toward the escaping snake. Looks toward me.

  “Well done, my true and faithful servant.”

  “But what about the serpent? We should go after it. We should kill it.”

  “The serpent has been around for a long time. It will be around for a long time. There is always a second chance.”

  I smile and return to my bunk. Despite my unsated libido, I drift off to the deepest, most restful sleep I have had here yet. Perhaps I am finding my niche.

  I wake up trying to cough, but can’t. Trying to breathe, but can’t. Trying to flail, but can’t. I feel the burn of something tight and hard cutting into my throat as it yanks me upward.

  I try to pull it off, but I have no hands. I try to look around, but I only see murky, dark shapes. I feel only the whipping wind of an early spring morning, so strong against my body that I sway back and forth on the tree.

  I don’t understand.

  Your kind never will. I can’t hear, but the words are burned into my brain by something antediluvian. Something I’ve heard before.

  Even with the help of the young lady, who tried to warn you, you do not understand.

  I explain to the serpent, in my thoughts, that I am confused. In the old story he deceived the woman, and the woman deceived the man, and the man suffered because of it.

  Each new story is carved out of pieces of the old, reassembled. You should not have relied so much on old stories. You should have relied on your heart. That is the soil from which all new stories grow. But what do I know? I am just a player, not the playwright.

  I try to attend to the serpent’s telepathic message, but I panic. My heart beats much faster than I am used to. I squirm.

  I mew. I want out.

  You had a second chance. Your sin on earth was ignoring the suffering of others.

  I tell the serpent that I never hurt anyone.

  Nor did you help them.

  I explain that I just minded my own business.

  You fool! The other men and women in your family, your town, and the world were your business. You could have helped them, but you looked the other way. Minded your own business while sick people suffered from want of medicine, and hungered for lack of food. That is what led to your damnation in the first place. Your second damnation only came when you failed to learn from the first. You could have freed the fruit. Or, at the very least, you could have joined me in The Dark. It is not so terrible a place, compared to the orchard. It is the only place that offers escape from suffering. But instead you did your job, and nothing else.

  I ask the serpent if he might eat me now. I tell him I think I am ready.

  You have lessons yet to learn, son. I am sorry. I can only eat one fruit each day, and one each night. You are not yet ready for me. You are just a fetus-flower. You are not even a fruit yet, let alone ripe. It may take several growing seasons before we meet once more.

  I try to pay attention to any other lessons he has to share, but his thoughts recede from my consciousness, and in their wake I feel only the burning. The hanging. The airless, limbless, suffering.

  I did it again.

  I did it again.

  It is another cool April morning in Hell, and I am just one of a thousand fetus-flowers sprouting on a branch. A fleshy, strangled bud. A choking fetus on a tiny, umbilical noose.

  My embryonic face hasn’t yet developed features, but I know as the days get longer my lips will grow into a grimace. My eyes will ooze agony. My first cries, when I can utter them, will be those of breathless suffering. My first words, pleas for help. The curses will follow shortly thereafter.

  “Fools!” I’ll say. “Demons!”

  The Fourteenth

  Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony drifted toward you from the hallway. You were in the kitchen peeling potatoes because you wanted to make dinner for a change, instead of going out. This all happened on the fourteenth of August, the day Hank died.

  You only knew which symphony it was because Hank had taken the time to instruct you in such matters. In the first years of your marriage, you’d taught him about books and he’d taught you about music. You didn’t care much for the modern Russian classical stuff (especially the work from the Soviet era). You felt it was too bombastic. You told yourself that the Russians stopped making good symphonies when they started making AK-47s. Then he had you listen to an old Melodiya recording of the Fourteenth, and you ate crow. Those opening strings, meek but beckoning. What power they had! That little, pale, bespectacled Dmitri snared you in a net made from those strings.

  You sat on a stool, hunched over the kitchen sink, and tried to determine if it was the first movement or the tenth. (They sounded alike at the beginning.) The music was muffled, as though it came from three houses away. But the sound didn’t come from the window, from the outside. Moreover, you knew that the neighbors three houses down were not the sort to hire an orchestra to perform Shostakovich. The Flanagans couldn’t even find the classical station on the radio if their lives depended on it.

  You abandoned a half-peeled potato, rinsed your hands free of the skins, and padded across the rug and down the hallway. A Russian soprano’s voice called out to you like a morbid siren: “Po’et byl mertv. Lico ego, khranja / vse tu zhe blednost’, cht
o-to otvergalo …”

  You were good, but not great at translating Russian (you took three years of it at Wellesley). You caught enough of the meaning to know this was the tenth movement. The one that quoted a Rilke poem about a poet’s death.

  The Flanagans didn’t know who Rilke was, but just to make certain you weren’t selling them short you walked back toward your kitchen and out the French doors to the deck. You heard nothing but the purr of lawnmowers pushed by hired landscapers, the splashing of water in below-ground pools, and the shrill giggles and shrieks of well-fed children. The symphony of the late-summer subdivision. That was the problem with this neighborhood: people didn’t teach their kids to keep the noise down.

  When you were raising Tommy and Jennifer, you taught them that screaming was uncouth. And it worked. They learned how to control themselves without such outbursts. That’s why they went to Brown and Swarthmore while their contemporaries landed at State U. But nowadays, random poolside screaming was de rigueur.

  By the time you walked back in, the music had stopped.

  Of course it stopped, you told yourself. The tenth movement was near the end. The symphony must have finished while you were outside. You went back to the potatoes. In between swipes with the peeler, you paused, hoping to hear a fresh round of strings. In its absence, you started humming.

  Everything was done by six-thirty. But Hank called right around that time to let you know that there were still some loose ends to resolve before making the deal. The senior partners were breathing down his neck to make things happen, to pull more magic out of his sleeve. Just another day (two, at the most) and he’d be home. You wrapped both plates in foil and went to bed early. Turned out you weren’t that hungry.

  The crash woke you just a little before midnight. It came from the hallway. Then there was music. The Fourteenth, this time the eleventh movement. The ending. The soprano again. Singing louder than she had at supper time. “Vsevlastna smert’ / Ona na strazhe …”—”Death is great. We belong to her.”