THE FOURTH.

32.

Forward.

I move forward. There is comfort in my feet, pads thick as rain-boots. I woke up, after all, with the Monkey murmuring over my head. The Wall smells of ambergris and its flowers are weighted like suicides. Hunting the old emerald self, dingy facets of a forgotten sapphire elbow or garnet knee, merrily we go along hunting the sloughed shells of me on this corpulent Road, we highwaymen looking to rob ourselves. Once perhaps I was a streak of charcoal painting the Road like a cannibal, but I could not say. My mind is a laundry line, flapping white wings as a rinsed sky, drops on a tin washboard. (But are there welts on my back, measured kisses of the rack? Oh, yes.) Here we go round, here we go round and what do I expect from the svelte malarial dawn but another suspense of hours? There is comfort in a tail around one's neck, I suppose. I walk looking down, trying to see what the Grasshopper saw, the prim insects that once were Walls. Trying to see the next step on the Path, trying to see where in these muddy tracks the spider-leg pinpricks twist, trying to divine subsequence as though it were water. (It is as though a thing has been taken from me, now that I am named, now that I am gold. I slip, I cannot hold a thought.

But I am not concerned. The sun shines through me like a sieve, I cannot hold the ragged tuxedo tails of my dream, I slide easily along the Path, a little chipped-paint boat. I cannot think, I can hardly feel my body, the only weight being the fat rose-green Compass resting as solidly as a breadloaf in my spacious belly. I am made of air, suddenly, constructed of my own breath. Because of a name which somehow takes as it is given? Because of a border, a limit, a Wall which walks with me, cradling close.

Call me by name and inchoate I will sidle up to your princely thigh, call me by name and be made an alms-cup, be made mendicant on my Temple steps, be beggared and crippled because I cannot be a word, only a word, a tongue-curl which is me, a flick of lip, a syllable or two, certainly not three, and is this me after all, chained to the sea floor by a creeping sound, vermin of aural combinations? It is not so pretty a madness when it is named, then it is a patient, wrapped in white and pinned to a butterfly board. Then it does not blaze or consume and I am not, I am named and still as Stone, it is not what I wanted, what I came for, no, not what the contract stated, but I will take it with grace-) "Do you smell it?" The Monkey sniffs the air, alert and aroused, face banging into the air like a hickory switch. "I smell the chlorinated honey-grim, I smell the hominy and loam. Hoo! It is the End."

I looked where he did, and saw nothing but the linear Wall stretching like a cat's claw, and the tallow of the horizon.

"It is an empty day, Monkey. It is a day for walking. I do not think we will find anything. It is a day for Skimming Over, cream from milk."

The Monkey bit his lip and ventured a resigned little chuckle.

"If you like. But I can smell sap and plum sauce. We are Nearing."

"Oh, stop," I sighed, "Can you not speak to me outside of riddle-realm?"

"Should I speak of the Bear we abandoned to his beauty? Should I speak of your visions? Should I preach the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?" He paused like an insect on a leaf. "Should I speak of how I do not wish it, after all this, to be the End?"

"Do you not?" He looked earthward, blushing if a Monkey could blush.

"No. I am accustomed to you now. I should not be surprised. It is always like this, and I am always sad. Hoo. It is the smell of the sky on your shoulders that does it, that roots me to you at the last of all possible moments. Let us try to be quiet. Words spoil everything."

And so we went, softly and methodically, Monkey dozing off on my shoulder and politely remaining smugly silent. And of course I could not see what was ahead, could not see the terminus, the road sign marking the last detour, could not see its nailed boards and blue shadow until we nearly tripped over it.

"I told you, I told you," hooted the Monkey, clapping his little hands. "I smelled it miles ago! Humangirl, your nose is a poor servant. The End! The Uttermost End." He danced a little, though less happily than he once did, when in the delicious throes of proving me wrong.

It was nothing more than a little Door, no higher than my wedding-band waist, arching to a delicate point at its crown, like a Bishop's miter. Deep blue, was the Door, expanse of India ink, flowing tempura-thick over boards knotted and hewn with a dull axe. Vaporous frescoed stars floated around its rim, edges blurred and fading into the expansive blue, giving each a pale aureole, a vague corona. I felt myself falling into the color, as though it were truly a lake and if touched would ripple outwards from my finger. But there was no knob anywhere on its ornate surface, and it did not leap out or gobble us where we stood. In fact, it had not even been following us. We had stumbled on it quiescent and still, and even now it made no move to seize us.

"Why doesn't it want us, Ezekiel?" I marveled, slightly disappointed.

"Do you want it?"

"Well, no, of course not, it's dreadful . . . but . . . I cannot quite say . . . yes, I think I do. It is Not Like the Others."

"No, my Kore, my love, it is not. It is the Last Door, Your Door, and this is the last day. Not the cream but the last dregs of milk. And I must leave you to it." He smiled wanly and scratched his elbow.

"You are a slippery little thing. You come when I do not want you and go when you please. You drag me out of the crone's hut only to leave me here, when I don't even know how to open a Door I shouldn't want ajar. I am nearly dead, if my jaundiced skin didn't advertise it, and you will go and leave this bird's wing Door as my headstone."

I wept a little, but it was cursory, the shedding of such valuable tears as my own metallic drops. (Collect them and be a sultan, be a banker, be a thief of forty) I knew it all along. When long, long now before I lay beneath the radiating Angel I was alone with her, in her arms so cold they burned, and it would be so again. I am the Maiden, and when the Maiden faces the Queen it is alone, so no one will see that she thinks the monarch beautiful and worthy of love, even as she seizes what is hers from those white arms.

"Hoo! Darlinggold, if you think you have been carrying a Key all this Way for any other purpose but to open a Door, then you are a silly girl and you do not know how these stories go. It is the Uttermost End. Everything is simple from here on out." I tried to hide my surprise that he knew of the Lobster's little Key, which I still had nestled in my pack.

"As for the rest, at the end, you are always alone, it is inevitable. The Maiden goes on, the Beast stays behind and catches tears in his whiskers. But as I have tried to tell you, even this is only an event, not a true end. It is the borderland of a sequence of events, but there is no revelation to be had. There is no conceivable end in this place, it goes onandonandon, past the last permutation of a chess game, past the last rose that ever grew. 'Last' and 'End' are meaningless here, and when you go through the Door you will find nothing more than the Road stretching on, downdowndown, past where you thought it must end. I have played my part for you, within you. Now it is done and I will go back to what dark corners Beasts originate from, and you to the cloistered courtyard that all Maidens find behind the last Door, even if it is not truly the last. But perhaps it is, after all," his eyes twinkled. "I have been known to lie."

"There is still so much I do not understand," I said softly. "I do not even know, truly, who you are." He threw his skinny arms around my neck and stared into my marble eyes.

"Oh, my darling, I am myself and no other, no other unto the nexus of all possible endings. Look deep enough into my eyes and you will see Roads and Walls extending infinitely, in my pupils lie every twist you have ever walked. I am secretive, I will not give you answers, but there they lie, scattered about like shrapnel."

I swallowed thickly, seeing in those black pools all the miles upon miles, the spurt of a thousandthousand fountains and the right angles of hedge Walls, and the wide Road, extending its massive Avenue like an artery into the body of the Monkey, knotting and turning and opening onto itself, another thick snake breakfasting on his tail, sauteed and served with tea.

"Good-bye, then, Beast," I whispered, awed.

"Good-bye, Kore, my Beauty, my Darlinggold."

"Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?"

"Air. Air, all around, like wings."

He covered my face with his hand briefly, tenderly, and I could smell the wheatfields and fallen autumnal apples on his leathery skin. And then he was gone, vaulting over the Wall in an artful leap, tail disappearing over the wild green.

33.

I turned, creaking like a hinge, back to the Door.

So blue, so blue, and I could hear it panting slightly under its veneer of silence, struggling to wait quietly, like a good girl, and fold her hands under her legs. And I stare, into and at, unable to move when at last it comes to it. It seems such a large step, the span between two sparkling feet.

I draw the Key out of my pack where it had lain since the millennia past when the Lobster clattered. And it too had changed, once the indigo of his baroque claw and my impressionist belly, it had shivered into gold like an autumn tree, nearly disappearing into my palm creased like a map of some lost continent. But the surface of the Door lay as smooth as a child's mouth, no Keyhole marring its oceanic sheen with black.

(-For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say-) Keen and bright the unmarred surface, and I without a guide to point the way with a finger taking up the sky. The Door seemed to laugh, to shake soundlessly with mirth at this hapless girlthing trying to enter its starry girth. (How am I to do this alone, who avoided the Doors so well and gracefully for year upon day?) How to elude one, simple. How to penetrate a laughing fence, I could not say. I am weak and blurred, contours entering themselves and diffusing like the perfume of the harem, My ignorance like a fat jewel, something I could grip in my hand and turn over, marveling at the workmanship. I am playing that same old four-string chord, stretching my sapling fingers to press down on a neck like I was strangling a goose.

I am old, old, now, no Maiden but that very crone with her diseased bones, her desiccation, her bleeding liver, her cataracts. Full of lack, bursting at the perforated edges with emptiness, pressing, pressing (-So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward, Turn itself back to re-behold the pass-) pressing in like a tourniquet, and it is her blood that gushes wantonly from my body, sick and congealed. I have progressed, the effort is so tiring, so full of weights, hanging on fish hooks from my beaten breasts, pulling the flesh earthward, to entice the worms. How do I open it? Does she lie on the other side, all lithe paleness and un-mad, un-sick, un-weary? Liquid Stone, airy and full-lipped, surrounded by her throne of flapping fish? I cannot compel her, ever, so full of every Compass ever minted, and I with only my chubby-cheeked one, so pitiful in my belly, shrunk into a corner of acidic solace, (-And never moved she from before my face, Nay, rather did impede so much my way-) all quivering magnets and wild needles cutting. I cannot excavate from her womb the fluid of a grimacing umbilicus to heal myself, I cannot put up scaffolding over her snowbody and chip her down to the size of a pill I can swallow and become. I cannot even open her docile Door, her little lapdoor, pink-tongued and eager. I cannot (-Thou art my master, and my author thou, Thou art alone the one from whom I took-) for will I once in the cloistered cobbledstones be hers again, to write on, to be carved, to be marked by her terrible black tongue, to be her shuddering paper? I have no long yellow teeth to show like crescents suns, how without a Monkey by to scream and gnash, will I keep her from scrawling over me againagainagain?

But the Door, (did the Door and swifter than I) the Door waiting for its answer, its correct walk-on-three-legs-in-the-evening magic words, the sibilant slip of a Key into its body.

And though its body is smooth and coherent, perfect polygon of gleam, mine is not, battered and meringued I, with pores like chasms burned there by my claws and ragged voice and I have always lain open as a book, read and skimmed and coffee-spilled, left spine akimbo. Because of the ease of sliding a Key between arm and rim, between the ulna and the radius bones, between the socket joints of my legs. Because I can be pried open like a window.

(-Behold the beast, for which I have turned back; Do thou protect me from her-) And so if the Maze has twisted in me, bone-Key hair-Key meat-key opening my chameleonbody to it and all its fingers and all its mouths and all its teeth, so may I twist in myself, (all things ending in the body) and open the Maze.

I took the Key in a shimmering hand, caught into fire by the afternoon sun, netted into a sphinx's paw by shafts of pikelight. Well wrought the delicate shell, serrated edge of claw forming the Key ridges, where it would fit and swivel. The Door seemed to hold its breath, chest swollen with amphibious lungs full up, peering to see if the correct sequence would be followed, the correct procedure observed, if custom and usualhow would dance as they were used, hand in hand.

Holding it like a blade I stood statuesque, arm outstretched like an orator to deliver scathe and curse.

(-Thee it behooves to take another Road-) And I plunged, delved, dug, stabbed it deep into the brittle surface, oh and the severing blow of fracture and slither (ininininin!) into the soft place between my coin-breasts, where there is a fine down like a gasp, and oh, the grinding as it chews inward, the molten gold blood sluicing from the sucking wound which is so like a mouth, so like the opening to a jeweled womb, so like an iris. (Ininin!) Rushing blood warms the Keybody, it is deeper than inward and I cannot see for the pain, the pain of opening which is always present at these little penetrations- (-Forth issued from the sea upon the shore, Turns to the water perilous and gazes-) See how soundless, accommodating, finger-crooked, the Door moves open a sliver, not enough to bite and tear, but enough for me to slip inside, like a Key. Its breath winds out like a thread soaked in gasoline, sour, tonguing the skein of air between us, searching for me, for the blood it smells. See it wait, still so patient, expecting that if I will not step I will certainly fall if I bleed just a little more. (Ininin!) But, oh, oh, see that the blood is not gold any longer, any longer, and how I have side-shifted the spectrum one last (but it is never the last) time, one last chloroform masquerade, one last ball with slippers worn through, one last night on the town under all those lights! I have flashed trans-parent, trans-lucent, cut glass, clear as the rivers of Babylon, and how the sun shines through me as though I were a goblet at the feast! Oh, how the clouds reflect milky in my brow, in my Grecian eyes, my singing foot! Fled color and now there is only light, light, light. I am made of light, brooks and streams, hair cascading like snakes from a glass-blower's pipe, pure and clean and clear at last, but it is never last, never last. I can move in any Direction, I hold all Direction within, and oh! See now it lying prettily within, the Compass with its thorn-needles and bouncing glacial norths! My little child, my little dusk-daughter so nestled in the glass belly, flushing all your greens and pinks, indignant at the disappearance of flesh. I am glad to see you, little one! Where shall we go, where shall we go? Forward is the only remaining place, I'm afraid, we must suffer to be eaten again, ininin and down, here we fly and fall. Into the Door at neverlast, slip of light we!

(-I cannot well repeat how there I entered-) And I step within, hush inside, whisper through, and there is a vanishing, of a perfect crystal foot as the deep azure of the Door closes with a coquettish latch.

34.

"I suppose you think you've arrived somewhere.

That you have won a thing, that you have passedthrough, achieved a fetching Grail."

Comes her voice like a grinding Stone, on her fishing-Wall as I knew she would be, covered in her opals like eggs, watersurface-shimmering, wings curving over her long back to the icy earth. The wound and the Key had together vanished from my glassy sternum. Her court of mercurial trout heaped themselves still along her white thighs as she exhaled that same noose of nettle-smoke, watching me with eyes like gutters trimmed in icicles.

"Hic monstra, hic monstra, puella. I suppose you think you have come all this Way and found me out, found a Lair, found a wicked, wicked Creature, a femme fatale, a Villain."

I sucked in my breath, blood ticking in my temples, and replied, "Angel, I have come through a Door. I suppose nothing more than that. But it did not capture me, I chose it."

"And now," she hissed, "you think I will wave my magic rod and reel, and heal you, you who disdain my frescoes and chuck my lovely navel-Stone down the gullet of a Monkey. Wretched girl, ignorant glass-piece, for your pleasure I will do nothing."

"I did not think you would. And I cannot make you do it."

I walked slowly to the foot of her alabaster Wall, through the familiar pale of her courtyard.

"I have no artifice, no companion, nothing to seek after. I am here blown clear as the southern sand, offering only myself, and you know you have been expecting me." I smiled my most charming smile.

"Why do we not at least fish together awhile, since I have come all this Way?" I held out a crystal hand to her, crossed with lines like longitude or-(in this sign thou shalt conquer) to be helped up onto the slippery Wall.

"You have come no distance at all, girlchild."

But she hefted me up and by her side, handing the rod to me, and smoking resentfully. "They are biting on Grasshoppers this afternoon, young and crisp," she added. The Angel puffed her pipe like a squid sluices its ink. The fishing line trailed down to the icy Road like a web, into the neatly cut circle and frothing Roadwater. I held the arch of the rod gingerly, not knowing what next to say to her who regarded me with a catlike stare.

"Ask yourself, infant, how many times we have sat thus, among all these writhing fish. Ask yourself how many times we will yet smoke together under this tumor-white sky. And still you think it is an act of moment for me to heal your pathetic little death. You always do. I tire of patching you like corduroys." She exhaled from her carved nose.

"I have sat with you but once, Angel, when you gave me this sickness like a slice of cake."

"Yes, of course, dear. I am terribly wicked. And this petite scene has been played only once, only once. Why, we hardly know our lines! We must practice, a thousandthousand more times, until we choke on their dust."

I fixed the rod into a crack in the Wall, ignoring the thrashing pulls at the line.

"I have gone mad for you, as you wished me, as Ezekiel said it must be, lost in marshes and under red robes, I have lost my eyes and eaten my name and it has all been because you could not let me be, you could not let my walking lie, you wanted me and so I have become what you wanted. Why do you mock what you made?" I stared blank-eyed at the repetition of Wall-rims endless to the horizon and further on.

"It is my entertainment, to watch you flop and gasp like one of my little trout. You would not rob me of that, my puella, no. Do you not see what you have achieved? Completion, End. At least a facsimile of it. It is so beautiful. And your singularity is the best of all. You cast a shadow neither sunward nor back, it is only alwaysnow, for you. That is enviable. But you have done it without Purpose, without intent, and so it means nothing. You still and always understand nothing of what I could have given you. I would have made you a Hero, you would have been made entirely of blaze, and eaten the Labyrinth in a swallow, so great would have been your need. As it is, you have found your Way to the End, and you do not even know it, because you would not accept the Quest. The function of a Quest, my function, is merely to make the End significant-you squandered me."

"But it would have been illusion. Nothing is the reality, the absence of Center and meaning. I carried it like a shawl around my shoulders. You would have laughed as I drowned naked."

"How vivid. Cling to your little cliffs, if you must. My gifts are vast." She bent her archer's mouth around the ivory pipe. "Oh, humanchild, must we do this, must we play this game where I am a frightful Witch and you are the brave Maiden? Don't you want to play something else? I am very nice, you know. Put your mouth on my wrist, it tastes of peppermint. Wouldn't it be more fun? Why don't you be the witch this time?" She smiled for the first time, teeth like a row of soldiers, leonine and seductive. I felt my old helplessness roving.

"I am dying and you speak of games. How long do you think I can sit at chatter before nightfall when I will be mad again? Give me what I came for." The Angel shook her sapphire head.

"Oh, all right. You are such a stubborn little caryatid. You must always have it precise." She cleared her throat dramatically and fluttered her razor wings wide.

"I will not!"

I spread my hands, hopelessly confused, lips parting in anguish, unable, at this last which is not last, to comprehend her animal mouth. She moved close, trailing her fingers from my waist to my chin, slowly, tattooing cold into my flesh, her dark eyes drawing those same snail-patterns inkless on glass skin.

"Oh, pretty little thing, we all play our parts for you. Do you like it, precious puella? Are we very good at what we do? Do we satisfy each and every night when that red, red curtain goes up? All of us glossy little ducks in a row? Do you love us, dearest, darling, only? Will you clap, clap, clap? Shall I bow at the end as I yield? Oh, Darlingglass, will you laugh at all the right parts?"

She laughed herself, deep in her throat, an intimate rumbling as she lay her silky head on my terrified chest. "It is all an act, my own, but it is all there is. All we have, you and I. The rapiers are real, the duel is true. But you never see the stage, tragicsylph. I suppose I cannot ask for that much. I am a witch forever, and you will fear and never love me."

"Please," I whispered through loose and prismed lips, "take it out of me, take it out, let me be whole."

"You are close to the skin, now, beautiful, close to the rim, dancing out beyond its edge. You could put out your smallest finger and see the pattern. But it is not, after all, the Way of things. Come, come now, you must play your part, too. Threaten me, put your hands on my throat, tell me you will surely kill me like a brave and good Maiden ought to, if I do not wipe you clean as a window."

She leaned upon me like a divan, smiling her disturbing kittenish smile, bewildering and lithe, full of snow. I put my hand tentatively over her mouth, shrill cold screaming lip to palm with the contact, and her eyes twinkled with mirth above the flesh-hyphen.

"Just stop laughing at me and help me. Or I . . . I shall. I shall throw all your fish back into the Road and shovel in the hole. I will snap your pipe and your rod. And . . . I shall Devour you piece by piece down to your last feather. I can do it." I spoke in measured beats and though I didn't really want to harm her, I understood instinctively that it was the Way. That was clear now, clear as I was.

"Oh, brava, darling," she said, muffled by my hand which I removed without expression. "It is so very hard to be strong when you need something from someone."

"I want to be well. I am not your mouse to bat between paws. I want to be as I was. I shall go if you do not, and whiten to dust among the poplars and whitethorn. and then you will have no one."

The Angel's face flushed with her pearl-blue light, her corona pulsing once, twice.

"Oh, Darlingglass, don't get upset. This is all pre-determined, after all, written on the whalewalls in indelible ink, at least more indelible than mine. You cannot blame me for wanting to drag it out a bit. You are such lovely company. Kore, Kore, after all is done and done again, there is no end and no beginning, there is only we two, alone in the dark, for always."

She leaned forward in a cloud of yucca blossom tobacco and ambergris, her face filling up my vision like a moon, and touched her lips to mine. I shrank back from her glacial kiss, breathing in gulps.

"My dear, this is how it is done. The Kiss that heals the Maiden, removes the thorn from her thumb. I gave you your delirium with a Kiss, and I take it back, as you have commanded. It is the Way. You have been such a good girl all this time, right on cue, will you allow propriety to keep your death snuggled up inside, just below your heart, safe and warm?"

She touched the skin of my sternum, where the Key had thrust, and leaned in again. This time I did not shrink, but allowed her snowdrift lips on mine, pressing like a vise, crushing the blood from my face, and the delicate bones, pushing her face downward (downdowndown) drawing me upward like a bucket from a well. Chewing lightly on my lower lips, still connected thus, she whispered, "At the other side of a Door lies nothing but another Door, and another, and another."

Each "another" was punctuated by the press of her diamond teeth on my mouth. "I am the Door that catches you, and you must step through me, limb by limb. Come in, come in, my Darlingglass, it is the Way. Hoo."

Her eyes were shut and in the sheen of her high cheeks I could see my reflection, irises large and green as sugar cane. I moved forward, only slightly, only slightly, an intake of breath, and I slid through the scrim of ice, I breathed through her skin, passing through her body and the wriggling trout and the ice caves like Temples, through the river-network of her veins, where fish upon scaled fish spawned towards her great silver heart, booming cavernously, (thumpthumpthump) and I passed the threshold of her bones, and I passed the barrier of her spine, (ininin!) and I breached the Wall of her muscled back, flowing through her in one long inhale. I went through her like a pane of glass.

My last hand disappeared through her torso with an exhale of smoke, smelling slightly of apples strewn over a field of cut wheat.