The Book of V.: A Novel(29)
“They were at the top once,” was all the woman said.
And then what?
The king is walking toward her. He retreated briefly, to retrieve the bottle, but now he is back. He is down to only his black robe now, and the robe is open—is she imagining this?—to an extent that it wasn’t before. Esther closes her eyes and hunts for the place the Gadol woman showed her. A dark, cold enclosure. It was meant to be a space outside her body, meant to be deposited into an egg, or a seed, whatever object she was working to alter. But Esther brings it inside herself. Then she brings herself inside of it, lowering herself down until a vibration finds her. At first it’s almost like a humming, and then, without warning, it’s nothing like that, it’s a school of fish pulsing at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of thousands of fish in a resplendent eddy contained within her. But they won’t be contained for long. They resist her boundary, pressing outward as they flash and pulse, forcing her to enlarge. The dangling hand breaks in, not as spell or tincture but goading, meant to propel. There was power in Esther, the woman said, more than she would have guessed, but it was old and lazy and had to be whipped into action, and it was fragile and had to be handled with care?…?so Esther lets the hand hang in the room with her, a calm, terrifying stillness in the center of the pulsing eddy. Catastrophe is what she’s going for, a full vortex, but to get there, she cannot self-destruct. She must become the eddy, the fish, the infinite flashing, without inhale or exhale, no longer breathing but existing, not waiting but allowing, not wanting but receiving.
It is exhausting, this work, far harder than digging or chopping or squatting. She is very cold, then very hot. As the pressure builds, she feels as if each of her digits, each limb and nerve, is being squeezed in its own vise.
A pressure from without. Esther opens one eye. The king, seemingly oblivious to her efforts, is tilting the wine bottle into her goblet, and for a moment, relieved of the pressure and the flashing, she lets herself rest. She waits for the wine to flow; when it flows, she will force herself in again. Here, you may be thinking, she will lose her courage. She’ll drink more wine, she’ll start enjoying it, this will go back to the story it is supposed to be, where the maiden wants her beauty, wants to be queen. But Esther is very stubborn. And her stubbornness is aided by the fact that nothing flows. The bottle is empty. The king calls out, “Another!” and Esther, wanting to stay ahead of whoever will be sent in with the wine, dives back in again. Down, she tells herself, and the heat flips back to cold. She is distracted briefly, pulled from the vibration by a recognition, obvious yet fresh: the king has people; she has none. Don’t be distracted, she tells herself. Don’t be afraid, go in again. She urges herself lower but the pain is shocking now, the dark hole grips, the lights begin to flash fitfully and with menace, no longer the pulsing school of fish but a storm. She gasps but keeps her eyes closed, refuses even to peek. She is aware of the king on the other side but wills herself further in, downward, and noise recedes. The vortex holds her. She has never felt cold like this.
Years pass, or twenty seconds. When she is loosed from the place, dropped from the swirling, the king is still alone and staring at her. He drops the empty wine bottle, but without force, and the bottle doesn’t break as the goblet did—instead it rolls in Esther’s direction, arcing and wobbling until it reaches her foot. She looks down. Her sandals are in tatters; her toes have grown talons. “Your wine,” a voice calls, and the king rushes to slam a door, blocking a passage Esther didn’t see before. He throws his back against it and calls back, in a singsong to hide his quavering, “Wait! Not now!” Sweat rolls down his face. Esther turns to the mirror. She is larger in every direction, taller, wider, longer. Her face is made of her features but they have taken on new proportions and aligned themselves at new distances from one another. Her eyes are weirdly far apart and her nose and mouth unnervingly close. Her stomach has swelled, forcing open her robe, revealing breasts as small as kumquats. She pulls the robe closed, but not before she’s sure he’s seen. Her thorny feet are obscenely long, her skin mottled and rashy, her hands so fat they look like paddles. She holds them up for closer inspection and flexes them, then rises on her toes and finds that she can do this, too, and at these assurances that she is still in basic command, the blood hammering in her ears calms a bit. Still, she is shivering as she turns to face the king, who is flat against the door, his eyes huge and desperate. “What is this?” he shout-whispers.
Esther arranges her throat. “This is me,” she answers. Her voice is her own. A minor comfort. “Here I am.”
WASHINGTON, DC
VEE
Banished
The instant she spun away, Vee knew what she had done could not be undone. She fled, taking the back stairs to avoid the women’s party, running until she reached the guest room on the top floor, locking herself in. She shivered uncontrollably. She could not make thoughts. She heard the sound of the house emptying, heard shouting, Alex and Hump, then silence, and time.
A knock, later. Late. She may have slept. Hump’s voice on the other side. “Mrs. Kent?” She opens the door, but he is not the same man. His white-blond hair is damp and pulled into a point between his eyes. His eyes are eerily bright, the blue a marble’s blue. He strides past her into the room, plants his feet, folds his arms, and says, “What will we do with you?”