When We Were Animals(54)

I could hear my own voice, like a mongrel dog’s, grunting and gurgling, and I was surprised. I was blank. The world was white skin and red blood.

I tore at him until he wriggled out from under me. We were both bloodied and raw.

He ran into the darkness, the soles of his feet slapping wetly against the pavement.

I remember nothing else. My mind was truly lost.

I woke the next morning weeping, huddled in a tight ball against the front door of my house. My body shook with the pain of its injuries and the suffocating strength of my sobs. For a long time, I could not stop, and I put my fist in my mouth to hush my cries.

After a while, I had calmed myself enough to go inside.

That was the end of Beggar’s Moon.

*



Between moons, I went back to the mine. And I discovered something new in my exploration—a large, hollowed-out chamber, an echoing cistern. Even though its entrance was near the mouth of the mine, I had never noticed it before because it required that I pry loose a collapse of stones and crawl my way through a narrow aperture.

It was a majestic place, a sacramental place. The cave was circular, the dripping walls rising high like a dome in a church. At the very top of the dome was an opening, the size of our kitchen tabletop at home, through which I could see the dusky pink of the late afternoon sky, the overhanging bristles of tree branches.

The floor of the cave was mostly flat, but in the middle was the mouth of a wide shaft, roughly the same size as the opening above, that descended down into pure abyss. I wondered if the shaft and the opening had shared some kind of purpose in the old days of the mine, so symmetrical and aligned did they seem—as though God had poked a gigantic needle into the pincushion of the world. I crept close to the edge of the chasm and felt my stomach do vertiginous tumbles. I stared down into the void so long that I lost track of myself. I hugged a nearby outcropping of stone because I didn’t trust myself to stay sane exposed to such nullities. If I leaped in, I might fall forever. I wondered if I would die of fright before I hit the bottom so that my landing might be a curious ghostly bliss.

I thought maybe that’s where my previous self had gone, down there in the depthless black, and I spoke to her.

“Lumen Ann Fowler,” I said, trusting that my meager voice would carry down the well in the absence of any material to impede it. “Lumen Ann Fowler, Lumen Ann Fowler.”

I knew that repetitions of three had power to them. And if you could summon Bloody Mary by uttering her name three times in a mirror, then I reckoned you could summon a lost girl in a similar way.

“It’s me, Lumen,” I said. “I came looking for you.”

I waited, listening to my own breathing in that silent place.

“I know who you are. I remember you. Do you want me to prove it? Your mother wore orchid gloves at her wedding.”

I swallowed, and there was grit in my throat. I leaned my head against the outcropping of stone and gripped it tighter.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything. We can just be quiet for a while.”

It was a home. It was a chapel. A shaft of light shone down at an angle through the opening and lit up all sparkly the grains of dust afloat on the air. This was a chamber of echoes that might as well have been the clattering ossuary of my own mind, and I decided it would be a place of pilgrimage for me.

When the light through the opening above dimmed with impending night, I crawled back out into the mine shaft proper and piled a few stones in front of the entrance to my private citadel so that it would not be stumbled upon by strangers.

Once outside the mine I tried to locate the place in the ground where the cistern opened to the sky, but I never could find it.

As though the avenues of inside and outside used different maps altogether.





Chapter 8




Worm Moon was wet with rainfall. You listened to the showers against your windowpanes. You imagined what it must be like to luxuriate in such a torrent, naked, and you thrilled with anticipation. Blackhat Roy came back.

I went to bed early, listening to the thunder, and I fell asleep. But my body jolted itself awake an hour after I lay down. I lurched to the window and opened it and leaped out. It was all very simple when the moon came out. All the considerations and doubts and rationalizations of the daytime were sloughed away. I wanted to be outside, and so I went outside.

It is sometimes a joy to be rained on. The chill of it against your scalp, the tickle of it down the inside of your thighs.

I ran down to the lake to see the ripples on the water and to watch the lightning fork down from the clouds. The others were already there. Some were swimming in the black water, others lay on the muddy earth. I liked looking at the bodies from the shadows of the trees. To look at someone’s naked body in the moonlight is to know that person in a new way. Lumpy humanity laid bare. A person stripped of all masks. For surely, I realized, that is what we do. We start with one pure and concentrated version of ourselves, then we modify and mold, we layer defense over pretense over convention. By the time we’re done getting dressed in the morning, there is little left of who we really are. It’s all just art. Twee and ineffectual art. Cartoon figures drawn in crayon on a paper place mat in a family-friendly Italian restaurant.

Hondy Pilt was there, gazing monklike into the downpour. Sue Foxworth was there. And Adelaide Warren. Rose Lincoln came, too, emerging from the trees with Peter Meechum behind her. Rose’s breach had gone on longer than a year. Each full moon was supposed to be her last. But here she was again.