The Book of V.: A Novel(68)

A shift occurs in the color of the tent’s walls, an upturn of hue so slight it might only be perceptible by someone whose life depends on darkness. Vashti, who has not seen the sun in thirty-four months, experiences it as a pulse of fire. She turns her back to Itz and lets her robes fall off her shoulders until she is exposed from nape to waist. A gasp goes up in the tent, followed by silence as they take in what she is showing them: the wings spanning her shoulders, the beak pointing in tandem with her spine toward the sky, the two black eyes that look out from the top of the head.

She begged Baraz for the bird when she still imagined that she might escape aboveground. She had seen high priestesses turn their skin into parchment, had seen dancers in the night station do it, too, ink flowers they had never seen onto their buttocks or breasts. Baraz had balked, then given in—of course he had given in. He must have been relieved that she was no longer raging and pacing, as she had in the early days of her banishment, when she swung between planning ways to kill herself and planning a coup to topple Ahasuerus. I could do it, she would declare, I would win, to which Baraz would nod—of course. He nodded because he loved her and he nodded because it was true: if she called for it, she would have the loyalty of the guards. Most of them had worked for her father; they saw Ahasuerus as a benign but inferior intruder; they would turn for her if she commanded them to. She went so far as to order Baraz to gather arms.

Then, as suddenly as if she’d run into one of her walls, she was done. A calm fell over her, she lost her appetite for blood; she saw clearly that to wage war on Ahasuerus would be to destroy the kingdom. Her father had raised her too well for that. She knew that her banishment itself, understood by most to be her death, would be enough to confuse the people for thousands of years, and that to reverse it would be far worse, that the course had to be kept. She would have to flee, instead. And so the bird began to take shape in her mind, and soon she wanted it not only in her mind but on her body; she wanted to become it.

Baraz brought substances, some for her to drink, some for her to smoke, as he worked with his needles and ink. The needles were longer than any she had seen, made from antelope horn, he said, and she played with the ones he wasn’t using, rubbing their silky lengths against her lips, jabbing their points into her fingertips until she bled. She was high, she was hibernating in highness—and all the while, the heavy air never moved. Then Baraz came with news. His favorite virgin, the one who did not want to be queen, had been chosen. She had turned herself into a beast—no, not metaphorically. She had tried to escape her fate, and failed, and now the palace was thicker with guards than he’d ever seen it; some were new, loyal to Ahaseurus, others brought in from Persepolis, men who’d known Vashti since she was born. Her idea that she would sneak out in costume was unlikely to succeed.

This time, she did not scratch or slam the walls. She thought. If Ahasuerus learned she was alive, he would break. Any equilibrium he’d found—which the new queen was testing, evidently—would be spun into chaos.

And so the fox. Vashti did not know that Esther was above somewhere, in the bones room, working out the same problems, devising parallel solutions. Though she must have known. Esther, too. They must have moved, in moments, as one. Or, it was simply obvious, universal: anyone would think first to fly, above the earth, and, when that didn’t work, to go through.

She turns now, baring the fox that crawls across her stomach. One front claw wraps around her waist; the other cups her left breast. Baraz’s lines are simple but bold, so that the fox’s tail, skirting her ribs, appears to quiver. Itz’s mouth is open. Agony sings in Vashti’s ears. Who is this whore, she thinks. This whore has swallowed the woman who was called a whore for her virtue. It does not follow. But of course it does. Of course Ahasuerus hadn’t wanted her to be virtuous at that particular moment, because it made her look frigid, and if she was frigid, it was about him, whereas a whore—or a leper, or whatever other conclusions they came to—well, that was about her. She was a woman like that. By the time his drink wore off, she knew, it was too late. She was gone, dead—and he could not change his mind. He could not be seen as weak.

So now, again, whore. Her robes open. Itz is aroused—it would be false to pretend that she can’t see his arousal. He does not know that ink is not reserved for the queen. None of them know this. They have never seen anyone’s body adorned in such a way, and it is easy to believe, in their stunned state, that only a queen is given these markings. (This is one way people come to think they know things, which they then tell to other people, who tell them to other people, who write them down, and so the thing stands as truth in a book and later on a pixelated screen: “A queen in ancient Persia was marked by animal tattoos.”)

They don’t approve of what has been done to the queen’s body, but they are moved by it. Even Itz. Itz is moved as a rebel and he is moved as an adolescent boy. He confers with his father.

It is easy, after that, to spread word among the other tents. It is easy—they are experts—to pack. They are gone within an hour, leaving only footprints, and these too, are gone by sunrise, when the breeze turns into a wind that sweeps low and fast across the sand.





MANHATTAN


VEE


Summoned Forth, She Kept Her State



The windows need cleaning, Vee thinks, as she follows Georgie back into the apartment—the sun’s angle highlights the soot. Can it be three o’clock already? She did not plan for the girl to stay so long. She makes a note about the windows, then sits at the table to take off her shoes. Her arches are tired. Her whole body is tired. She rises to clear off the table, then sits back down, attempts a halfhearted stacking of dishes and cups, and looks elsewhere. Her plants need watering. Windows. Plants. The tea has made her hands shaky. She sits, looking out through her sooty windows at the building next door. She should go sit on the couch so she can look at the park. But just as she knew she should say something to somehow cheer Rosemary’s daughter, and then failed to actually do it, she stays seated in the chair.