Demonology (14 page)

And the king knelt down and prayed to the gods for whom we are justly pawns and made himself grateful. Promptly, upon returning
to the court, he ascended to the throne, promptly he was trothed to the queen —until that felicitous day known as Andalucia
Charming —and promptly, too, they produced a lovely daughter, the hunting princess named
Diana, who wore frocks of blue and bows of red and who married a court musician. For some years all was right in the kingdom.

Wait just a moment, blessed auditor, bestow on me your forgivenesses,
for I seem to have misplaced a portion of the tale, such a large helping, in fact, as to be said to constitute
a second plate.
Fervent apologies. I urge you to return to
the enchantment in the courthouse,
of which I have earlier spake, having to do with the queen’s sudden and fervid declaration for the king, though he be the
man who changed her own brother into a
performing monkey,
etc. and so forth. This forgotten section of the story, which I append, concentrates on the author of this particular enchantment,
namely, the giant of Sandy Spit, known among neighbors and plaintiffs as Maurice.

He wore foul jerkins instead of proper clothes,
to begin judiciously enough, blouses that had been sweated through with undignified perspirings for many fortnights or even
months; he was fat, he was of such girth that when he ate too much his
own house
burst open along the joists; his breath smelled of goat’s milk that has been left out in the hot sun to accumulate gobs of
cheesy rankness, he rarely even wetted himself down nor wore a gay cologne. And further to his miserable condition Maurice
was alone raising up three progeny, a girl in her middle years, flaxen like himself, name of Kurt, a secondborn girl and boy
both with dark mien, like the giant’s deceased wife, many years departed. Their names were Elsa and Stibb.

Nearly every inquisitive scamp who hears such tales requires to have satisfied
the exact largeness of the giant,
and
so here I essay solution to the enigma, to common good of both young and old,
Just how big was the giant?
Since I only saw his children, I give surmise founded upon reports from travelers to distant precincts, who say of him,
taller than church spires, taller than the biggest oaks, taller than the cliffs at Mahon, tall enough to reach up to the green
cheese in the night sky and steal himself a fermenting hunk, massive enough to light his pipe from the morning sun, giant
enough to trample the oceans for footbaths.

As the giant was their father, headmaster of hearth, bringer home of manifold pork products including pork loins and pork
lips and sausages, his three children had no choice but to love him, yet for some ages they had noticed that he was
very dismally sad,
given to fits of grave sobbing and beating of breast, which would then cause floods in the streambeds of our land, this melancholia
dating to the demise of his goodly wife, of course; these many years, he had stayed singularly awake into the caliginous night
muttering
Love is an appellation known to all, and so why must I be so solitary unto the hereafter just my wee children but no woman
such as might love me and care for me despite my accursed appearance? Why am I destined to march unaccompanied along my path,
all men fleeing my footfall?
Upon encountering him, sleepless and cross, in the morning, the children confabulated many wiles and stratagems to distract
the giant from woe, including the imposition of elixirs such as
St. Johns Wort
into his tea, which Maurice liked of such strength that it had been known to corrode iron kettles. None of these stratagems
succeeded, alas, and the giant of Sandy Spit would therefore, in the midst of his fever, maraud
upon the land, abducting children, devouring livestock, visiting horrors upon gentlefolk. In such a fell mood, the giant one
day espied before him in the road, like a poisonous ant that needs to be crushed before habitations of the day can continue,
a small fleeing figure, namely
the once and future Andalucia Charming,
now queen of our demesne, who had been bathing in a small, clear loch, a reservoir of agreeable drinking waters much traveled
by lithesome harvesters of corn and other truck, and having spent an afternoon feeding berries to one of these lads, the queen
Andalucia, clad only in a womanly undergarment —as mischievous youths had absconded with her further draperies —she now fled
home, hoping to arrive at the castle before her most admirable mother, thereupon to make appropriate tributes to the staff
such that they might
neglect to mention
to her pro-genetrix this dishonored state.

Thunder upon the land. The giant caught glimpse of the small, curvaceous, and perfect queen, and soon fetched her up in his
fulsome palms, and here the giant held her to his eyes, being much afflicted in the matter of nearsightedness, at which he
immediately became a convert to the argument of Andalucia’s beauty. She was like a smoky crystal with its Hindering lights,
she was like unto the handsome portraits that hung in houses wherein his parents had once begged for alms, she was lily of
field, bird of air, she might
make wolves eat only herbs and sing madrigals. Upon my honor,
Maurice cried, and of course the sounds were audible across the land, as if a rogue city-state launched
infernal bullets and arrows
toward our cities,
I
believe a goddess has crossed into my wilderness and that I must devote myself to
her service henceforth and always.
The queen attempted to reply, of course, but Maurice squeezed her so tightly in his fist she fainted dead away making no
audible reply

Well aware is your storyteller of his dependence on conjuring and mysticisms
in this song, yet elegance and divine symmetry demand that he should now admit that the giant performed next as any gentleman
of honor would under like circumstances, viz., he too made an oath
of devilish properties.
Said he, over the sleeping body of the queen, now laid alongside a rutted winding track which snaked into the town, and here
I must profess again that the poem is of his own composition as I myself prefer blank verse,
Witches, warlocks of the night, restore this sleeper to her sight, make him next she sees be hers, the giant here who offers
prayers.
And with that he reclined beside her to await her waking and subsequent veneration of himself. Yet he had squeezed her so
tightly, that she didn’t wake,
and didn’t wake, and didn’t wake, and didn’t wake,
days commenced to resemble fortnights which soon resembled seasons, and she did not wake, and no traveler dared disturb the
vigil of the giant. New roads were dug to circumnavigate his vigil, until such time as he came to believe he had
killed his fairest love,
his second love, and that, by arrangement of deities and constellations, he was therefore beyond
grace
and doomed to wander the earth, bereft, or perhaps to spend too much time in contemplation of ribald masques and plays. Off
he marched in winter to relinquish himself to that paltry luck.

Thereafter, the queen, located by good gentlemen on horseback, was gathered onto a chestnut mare to be driven to town for
a grand adjudication,
namely the trial of that youth, much spoken of above, who would shortly be king.
Sleeping, she was transported by these gentlemen, and sleeping delivered to her splendid parents, and she did not wake until,
struck by a hailstone,
she opened her eyes, to espy the next king of our land making his way up the steps, ascending to his destiny, which is to
say
she opened her eyes to the felicity of love.

Now,
the giant galloped amok upon the lands,
dear friends, as, in his madness, he tore stands of oak and birch and flung them this way and that, and a blindness fell
upon him like a fever, and a terrible ringing like of a thousand bells did assail his ears, and he knew himself to have come
to a fork in the road in the deserted netherlands beyond all our maps. No longer did wolves, nor bears, nor leopards harbor
themselves there, idling in anticipation of smiting some passerby, no, life had fled and only the giant Maurice called it
home, that complete oppositeness of light, at the edge of which his lonesome welps, Kurt and Elsa and Stibb, made themselves
hoarse with beckoning. He did abandon them. And yet in his lonesome thrall,
nonetheless a ray of melioration,
though no sophistry or legerdemain or clerical bluster would raise him from his spot, for suddenly he conceived what the
lonely man must always come to know
that he is but a dream of sleep,
his term mercifully instant and insubstantial; so the giant was a dream, yes, and with him such excellent figures of dreams
past as Rapunzel, and Snow White, phantastes all, the fine prince called Valiant, arrayed beside the giant, each of these
with recitations of his or her heroic pilgrimages, no differences between one and another, for all stories issue from one
origin, one maelstrom,
the demiurge Pan;
all things from his dark, implacable brow are fashioned; and this is the imbroglio, fellow citizens, for I have come to
recognize myself as the dream the giant had, the giant dreams of me and I dream of the uneasy king, who knows his reign must
one day end, each of us a fervency in another’s sleep,
there is no teller of tales,
no protagonist, only the interior of a portrait painter in our village, who in the hours before uncovering the easel of her
labors, before she sleeps, tells her own daughter
Once upon a time.

for Elena Sisto

This was fifteen years ago in Hoboken. The storefront apartment on Madison Street. Her front step served as a landing pad
for local strays.

One stray was a shepherd-and-lab mix, one was a lab-and-shepherd mix, and one was a mix of so many breeds that it was impossible
to say what it was a mix of. One of the dogs was jumpy, skittish, given to aggression; the other two were sweet, friendly,
covered with fleas. Well, they were all covered with fleas, actually. She could never tell which of the three was the skittish
individual. When she came home to see one slumbering, she never knew whether to be worried, whether to greet this stray with
a loving, if tentative caress upon the top of its sloping canine skull, or whether to steer around it according to that antediluvian
proverb about dogs. She kept forgetting the markings on the offending beast.
How much had this anxious, panicky dog suffered at the hands, she guessed, of Hoboken’s sinister political action clubhouses,
where they kicked at it, or shot at it with their pearl-handled revolvers, in the weeks leading up to
the important school board election?
Which beloved local business owner had waved off this hound with a tire iron as it loitered behind his auto body shop?

And was it really three strays? Maybe it was only two? Maybe the dog that was the shepherd-and-lab mix and the dog that was
the lab-and-shepherd mix were actually
one and the same dog
and she just hadn’t paid attention to its coloring, hadn’t seen him from all the angles, hadn’t seen him in all times and
all places, frolicking, urinating. The way the dogs reclined on the step, in the afternoon sun, it was hard to know which
dog was which —one stretched lengthily, as if prepared to be roasted on a Southeast Asian spit, another coiled like a soft
pretzel, gnawing at abraded limbs. Sometimes the lab-and-shepherd mix had a scorched black expanse along its vertebrae mildly
overgrown with a henna tone, other times it was more flaxen, the color depicted on panels of American cereal boxes. The mutt,
on the other hand, had black spots. M. J. Powell was almost sure that it was one of the two shepherd dogs who served as her
occasional adversary —shepherds had that reputation, anyway, or at least they did when she was a kid.

She was on the way home from New York University, where she was in a graduate program at the Tisch School of the Arts. She
was a blonde and she was a dancer; she was inches from the surface of a teak floor; she wore leg warmers and unitards for
weeks at a time, knew the salesgirls at Capezio, she had worn the bloody toe shoes of the child bal
lerina; there was Stravinsky in her head, passages from Nijinski’s diaries, she had learned to count complicated time signatures,
sevens and nines; the church she attended, the church through which she lived and breathed, was the Judson Church, where everything
a body could do was an expression of the dance, the beautiful and the homely equally expressive meanderings of bodies in space.
She was a dancer.
She put her finger down her throat in the ladies dressing room on the fourth floor before rehearsal. Just the other day.
She’d gouged her own knuckles, on bicuspids and incisors, trying to get her hand out of the way of her own heaves. She was
uninsured. She wrestled her hair into a bun. Her toenails were cut to the quick. She had excellent turnout. She was a dancer
coming up the block with a black leather satchel from Coach over her left shoulder, with the strap of her white silk blouse
unstrapping under the strap of the satchel; she couldn’t do anything about the blouse, the strapping and unstrapping, because
she was also carrying a box of twelve plastic thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda in a variety of brands and types, and she was
close to dropping them, these twelve plastic bottles; she could feel them beginning to yield; she could feel the muscles that
attached her arm at her shoulder,
and the particular hypertrophy of these muscles, minute striations of myofilaments, interdig-tated rows containing the muscular
protein actin,
and she knew all this because she was about to be tested on it for a class in
kinesiology,
and if she had been dancing instead of studying, as she would have preferred, maybe this wouldn’t be happening, this painful
hypertrophy in
the region of the clavicle,
if she had danced, had slotted certain midwestern hardcore tapes into her battered portable cassette player,
stood at the barre, attempted to metaphorize the flight of the curveball of Ron Darling (a pitcher she liked), and mixed this
with certain repetitions out of Lucinda Childs, Sufimysticisms, silences and pauses that didn’t mean anything now in a specific
way but would probably mean a lot later,
if so then maybe the whole story would have turned out otherwise.