Dagger Key and Other Stories

The bus to the airport is about a third full. At first you sit in the back, far away from everyone, but then you think that if anything happens, if the freeway, for instance, bursts asunder and a giant claw thrusts up from the Bottom to snag the bus, you wouldn’t stand a chance; so you move up to a seat with a window that pops out. Wearily, you rest your head against it. Transmitted through the glass, the sound of the tires on asphalt is amplified into a whiney high-pitched insect choir—like Alvin and the Chipmunks on helium—chanting Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, over and over. You don’t need your loss pounded home and you sit up. It’s funny, albeit not funny ha-ha, that you’re off to Oberlin to hook up with a woman who sounds like no less a ball-buster than Abi, off into the same mystery, the same basic relationship, because you don’t think Abi loved you, not in the way you loved her. And yet no matter how firm Mauve’s expression to the contrary, the Tantra involves emotion. You and Mauve will have to arrive at some emotional accord, no matter how impossible that seems at the moment. Unless she’s bringing you to Oberlin for the purpose of revenge, to wreck your health and torment you as payback for the people who died, one probably being her partner…you hate that word in context of relationships. It’s no less redolent of inequality than wife or indentured servant; it merely omits the modifier. Managing partner, junior or senior partner, sex partner, and so on. It makes juiceless and dry the concept of a life together, and it presents the idea that handing over your heart to another animal for safekeeping involves a rational decision.

Those thoughts, irrelevant as they are, provide a short vacation from even bleaker thoughts—when you return from it, you find your head’s in awful shape, full of tears, recriminations, regrets, and you rest it on the window glass again, preferring insect choirs commemorating your dead girlfriend to the alternative. The rhythm’s changed ever so slightly:

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you kind of get into it, singing drowsily along under your breath, and that starts you thinking how she was when she wasn’t all deranged about the cause, she could be so damn funny—she had this dry sense of humor you often mistook for insult and you didn’t understand until later how clever what she said really was

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique…

that time in the lab when you made love by the light of the Bunsen burners, she wandered about afterward in the dark, materializing as she passed by the flames like a voluptuous spook

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…

you’re not sure you want to fly to Cleveland, because what if it’s a trap, what if it’s all the Bottom now, what if God now owns everything except this one scrap of protoplasm, you, and the rest has been swallowed up and spat out and reconstituted as evil

…Abimagique Abi Abi…

you don’t know anything, you have never known anything, and the chances are you never will, because here you are running off to meet this Stevie Nicks sound-alike who promises she’ll explain everything later, who likely wears gypsy skirts and plays a mean tambourine, stands four feet eleven and fucks like a champ, a woman to whom you’ll be no more than a dick, a launching pad

…Abimagique Abi Abi…

fuck it, you’ve had it with all the mystic claptrap, all the you-cannot-hope-to-understand-it-until-you-experience-it bullshit

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you’re glad the bus is close to the exit that leads onto Airport Drive, it runs for miles past hotels shitty burger joints topless bars and if you decide you don’t want to know how it ends, you can tell the driver to let you out anywhere

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…

but who’re you kidding, you’re hooked through the gills, you’ll fly to Oberlin, you’ll have Mauve or, should you say, she’ll once have you, because that’s the only way you’ll find out what happened and is happening, and even if what you find out is bad, painful, the end, well, at least you’ll understand the reason why you went through all you did with

…Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you do know one thing, though it’s certainly nothing cosmic—she’s already unraveling in your memory, and part of the pain you feel comes from trying to hang on to her reality, and you’ll keep trying to hang on until the pain is all you have left of her

…Abimagique Abi…

there should be permanent memorials in the mind, shrines with candles, enormous tombs stuffed with tastes and sights, cenotaphs and gigantic statuary, and not just these gauzy tatters of memory

…Abi Abimagique…

and what does this say about you, about us, about the way we are as friends, children, lovers, about God and the Bottom and human nature, that when people die, all that seems to happen is they fall out of the dream we’re having about the world

…Abi Abi Abimagique…

THE LEPIDOPTERIST