Hex: A Novel (4 page)

Here is Alice and her red backpack. And here is Alice with her small meal, unfolding the tinfoil, unscrewing the mug.

Alice with her book at the boulder she uses for her table. The girl is so still two titmice flutter into a nearby puddle and scoop water onto their wings. The foil catches the sunlight and attracts a crow which lands breasty in the near grass and examines her over the top of its heavy beak. The girl is so still the rock under the mountain yearns for her, reaches toward her, caresses the sole of her little white shoe.

But what is this? A girl alone in the forest? So many place settings at which she could be joined and so little left of her meal. The book’s pages turn steadily, hawk’s feather ruffling in the index. The sun, too, beginning to turn. Time failing her as time will always fail her. Shadows stretching their long legs out from the forest. What is the use of a book? Alice was trying to remember. What is the use of an empty space? She was thinking when she heard an unusual noise.

You know, let’s not overdo it. Alice was a curious girl and the noise was an attractive one. It sounded like suffering, but of a small sort. An animal suffering which can be comforted or, at the last extremity, humanely exterminated by a brave girl with nature in mind. A wise girl who knows the pressing impetus all nature has toward death—red in tooth, the saying goes, displaying its beautiful ruby red claws. In other words, a very young girl.

In any event, she followed the noise, her book forgotten, feather blown away, and found at the base of the rock a hole, perfectly round, very deep, such as the one a snake might make. Needless to say, down she went.

After a long and varied time, much travail, some confusion, some tears, Alice came to large lake in the world that was under her world at the other end of the very deep hole. In the center of that lake was an island, tiered like a pyramid of petit fours and as variously colored. It rose to a jeweled height above the lake’s still, black waters, ascending in steps which sucked at the light that was in that place as if they were made from slabs of sponge and the light itself a thin, blue milk being sopped. From that island, clearly from the pyramid, clearly from the pinnacle—a murky box barely visible atop the fantasy steps of madder rose, curded lemon, stale, ladyfinger green—continued to come such gentle, sorrowful moans that Alice’s heart was mostly wrung from her. She spotted a little boat, folded tight as an oak leaf, bobbing at the edge of a splintered green dock. Without any more thought than that, she was rowing for the further shore.

As Alice drew closer to its source, the sound changed its timber. Now it was reedy and granular—like sand gritting against the sides of a tumbler, like sugar soaking up an egg in the slurry of the whisk. “This whole dream has the sound of a dessert coming together,” thought Alice even as she looked for toeholds in the sides of the lowest level, the rose one, its fondant shell crumbling away in her hands to reveal the core which was indeed a cake, though one brittle with age.

Up, Alice went, up and up. She climbed a coralline layer rubbled with candied violets. She climbed a sulfurous layer of frangipane studded here and there with ancient, dolorous pralines. Up Alice went, punching determined fists through layers of gingerbread, red velvet, lemon curd, devil’s food.

“In a way,” Alice thought, “it’s lucky I don’t have a sweet tooth.” Her paltry meal in the meadow far above was a long
time ago and as she climbed the layers grew fresher—an airy tuft of angel’s food that was almost appealing, a moist wedge of Lady Baltimore delicately scented with orange instead of mold. She was very hungry. Indeed, Alice had seen all along evidence of the appetites come before her scalloping the edges of the fondant. The climbers, children it seemed by the size of their leavings, had burrowed a series of tunnels that turned past her sight as if the mountaineer himself, pushed past extremity, abandoned by both Sherpa and yak, had used his frozen mitts to fashion a last shelter. In fact, she believed it was getting colder. And wasn’t that she saw misted before her the ragged vestments of her breath?

Again she heard the sound, a sob at the end of human anguish, and up Alice climbed to the top of the last level.

Before her stood what she took, with a pang of disappointment, to be a hut of some sort, blear and squat. Then, squinting through the strange air—which had grown thicker as she climbed, milky as glacial water—she determined it was a hive, conical and many-layered. Finally, scrubbing a rind of sugar from her wrists and adjusting the little red backpack on her shoulders, she realized she was looking at a bundt cake: perfectly fluted, dusted on top with a drift of powdered sugar as fine as new-fallen snow.

Alice looked about, but there was nothing else to see. She walked to the edge of the pyramid and looked over. Below her the white air swirled. Here and there, immense firs pierced the cloud layer. The air ebbed around their bristling, dark crowns as if the trees rose from water. As if they and their brethren grew below the waters of the lake that floated still and black in the world underneath the world along the edges of whose own streams Alice had lain to consider the blonde murk of pebble
and sand, translucent fry and the nymphs, dark against the dark weeds, lazily extending their jaws.

“A little much,” said Alice, but behind her came again the sound—faint now, ragged—and, as there was nowhere left to go, Alice turned and entered the bundt cake through its single arched door.

She found herself in a round room paved with closely laid slabs of slate. The walls were waxy, fashioned of ascending cells that rose above her head to a much greater height than seemed possible from the outside. In the middle of the room a sullen fire and beyond the fire—how to describe it?. . .a cane chair upon which coiled the largest snake Alice had ever dreamed, and beside the snake a roiling shape, a ball, so hard to see as its parts lifted and seethed, separated into here a tail tip, tensile ribs, here a wedge head, eyes glittering, another lifting to rap the first below the chin—a battle then? A slow luxury?. . .the dry shift of their scales rubbing, the cream bellies and white throats turned to the firelight, and then again the moan—so low it is now just a whisper—and again the compacting shift, here a tail tip, there the arch of a foot, a wet mouth, a rolling eye, the head of a man.

“Hello, Alice,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, for it was she, “What a long time we’ve waited to have you here.”

“You have?” said Alice. She edged around the fire and stood just out of reach of the Queen’s whiptail. “How did you know it was me?”

“And because you have been brave,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, who was not listening, “and we reward bravery, but also because you have sometimes been cruel, and we reward honesty; because you have said the right incantations and sang the right songs, eaten the right fruits and drank the right waters; because, in short, you have done all the things a girl should do
if she wants to survive in an unexpected world, we reward you with your choice of one of our alters.” The Queen bowed her head and gestured with a regal sweep of her tail to the edges of the room.

“I don’t think I understand,” said Alice, looking around her. The room was hemmed with a wide array of junk. There were pop-bead bracelets and telescoping camp cups, plastic spoons that changed color when dipped in cold water, x-ray spectacles, false moustaches, one jelly slipper snapped at the strap. There were decoder rings and rusted slinky coils, an etch-a-sketch blacked in a mad labyrinth of lines, a red whistle, a cantering pony with a frayed, tangled tail. A miniature car. A miniature barn. A miniature cock doodle-dooing from on top of the weather vane. All manner of things, all manner of trash; some it, if she squinted, she might even recognize as once belonging to her. A doll’s head, a doll’s hand, a doll’s dress in yellowed pink sateen matted to the doll’s soft body.

“I don’t think that’s what I came here for,” she said.

“Yes,” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes. Her voice was dry and stealthy, the sound of something moving with economy beneath a season of dead leaves. “Anything you want, dear Alice.” She thrust forward, uncoiling from her throne, and stretched to impossible tension so her head hovered right beside Alice’s own. Her tongue flickered as if in approval of her generosity, her vast, incomparable wealth.

“Ok,” said Alice, who saw nothing there she wanted, “I’ll take him then,” and she pointed to the man in his lover’s wreath of snakes. As soon as she said it, Alice felt something within her settle. It was a fleshy weight, like a bullfrog squatting to fill its hole, and she wished for a moment she had chosen the doll’s hand—so cunning with its half-moon nails and the hole in the
ring finger into which one could insert a gem—or the disheveled pony caught in permanent flight.

“Yes?” said the Queen of the Tie-Snakes, turning to face Alice, her tongue playing unpleasantly about Alice’s cheeks, “My newest husband is what you choose?” The Queen returned to her chair, propping her chin on her top coil in consternation. “He owes us a terrible debt, Alice dear. I’m afraid you can’t have him for free.”

But Alice had not come empty handed. First, she offered the ball of tinfoil—so faceted, so bright at its peaks—but the Queen gestured with great disdain to a drift of just such spheres rolling loose behind her throne. Next, she offered the yellow thermos, still damp with traces of coffee, but the Queen sighed as if bored and some of her husbands who had lifted their heads from the brood-nest to watch made a sound like laughter, high and strange. Finally, Alice pulled the book from her bag—she had almost forgotten it, the story so sharply told, its pictures so brief and unshaded—and laid it before the Queen with little hope. A small sorrow pricked within her for the man who was now only loosely wrapped by the Queen’s curious husbands, but who lay so still, limp and exposed on the floor.

“Ah,” said the Queen, whispering down to the floor to turn the pages with her chin. “Dear Alice, are you sure?”

“Sure,” said Alice, “why not?”

And this offering the Queen accepted with great celebration and mounted at the top of her tallest pile. The book sat open to an illustration of the mountaineer bidding his Sherpa farewell, their hands almost meeting through the tangle of the yak’s rank pelt, before turning to face his last fatal ascent. Around them the mountain’s permanent clouds were sketched in childish puffs. Under their feet the mountain’s rock mounted into a brute vanishing point at the page’s far right corner.

‘A Brave Parting’ the picture was titled, and the Queen and her consorts hissed their delight.

So, Alice came to her prize and took him by the hand. Out they went from the Queen of the Tie-Snakes’ castle. Down from the pyramid and over the lake, across the meadow, through the forest, up the passage and out again to the world they had come from whose sky they saw was now burnished gold with the coming evening In the softer shadows where the tree shade touched the viridian stems of clover and vetch the world was cool and deep, plush, inviting. They lay down.

“My name is Alice,” said my mother to my father and my father told my mother, “My name is Dax.”

What else they said there, I don’t know. I imagine many questions were asked as my father, who was a beautiful man, saw my mother who had read about many things, whose eyes were weak behind her glasses, who chewed the side of her finger with small sharp teeth like the petulant teeth of a kitten or a mink. Or maybe there were none—my mother satisfied with her endings, my father satisfied with the feel of her corduroy skirt and the pull of her buttons against their strings. Instead my father gave my mother a ring of keys.

“These are yours,” he might have said to her, “and they open all the doors in all my castles.”

And what my mother said, his hand at her throat, pinching the ridge of her collarbone. . .

“You may use all of them, but this one,” my father said, sliding a small key off the ring and holding it up so she could see it in the failing light. “This key is the only thing forbidden to you, and if you use it, I will. . .” my father said, and my mother said. . .her hand on the small of his back. . .his hand. . . .his leg. . .the key
under her tongue, thick, a taste like blood. . .and then . . .when she swallowed it. . .the key down her throat, past her breasts and her heart, the key past her belly and the place where my brother was being made. . .lost for awhile. . .for a long while lost in my mother. . .the key. . .little blue key. . .forbidden. . .“I will kill you,” he said. . .until finally, one day, she found it again. . .lost so long she had forgotten. . .and used it. . .a stain like blood unwashable from her hands. . .and made me.

Yesterday, we all went up the mountain. Sitting at the dinner table two nights before, Daniel said, “I don’t understand. Why can’t we wait even just two more weeks? The baby’s so young still. It’s a long trip.”

This is how he refers to you, Ingrid, ‘the baby.’ Not your name, but your condition. I suspect this is how Daniel refers to all people: the lover, the suspect, the witch. It is to say the not-me, or in your case a distancing that means the not-mine. Though of course you are his, as you are mine and Jacob’s. That is to say: none of ours.

I wonder if this will change as you get older and begin
to resemble one of your mothers. Then Daniel may say, “my daughter,” a different sort of condition. I will always call you by your name.

In any event, we were eating a rabbit Jacob had snared in the forest, the meat comforted by a nest of halved potatoes and soft, steaming carrots, a bowl of barley, a salad, a loaf of seeded bread.

Jacob leaned forward to spear a haunch. This is how he argues: stripping the meat from the bone, cutting it into dark morsels and slipping each bite deliberately into his mouth. Jacob is not a large man, but he is tidily packaged. He moves as if he has considered each grouping of his body—the muscles of his arm, those of his back, the relationship of his ribcage to his spine, of his abdomen to his cock. He knows his impact as he hooks an arm behind the ladder back of his chair, takes a long drink, works the muscles of his jaw.

“It’s not as if I’m belying the importance of your traditions,” Daniel said. He turned to look at me. The two men sit at the heads of our table, which in its former life used to be the front door of the Feed Store. Despite Jacob’s sanding, it is visibly charred at the base where he sits. On wet days, it emits a lingering smoky scent. I sit facing the window. Through it I can see the hen yard and past that to the path we have beaten to the creek, over the creek to the first of our hives. Thingy used to sit across from me facing the mirror that hung there. Through it she could see: the hives, the path, hens, her own self—pale hair darkened to hay, and pressed heavy against her cheeks—the table spread before her and myself. First my face with her own eyes, then the back of my head with the mirror’s eyes. In her last few weeks, Thingy had become terribly swollen. In the evenings, when the swelling was worst, she would work off the rings she
wore studded about her fingers and set them in a careful line before her plate. There they caught the candlelight and refashioned it. Five gold rings making the light run like boiling honey pouring from a fire-cracked hive. . .

Daniel said, “What do you think, Alice? You’re with the baby more than we are.” Both men were looking at me. Jacob chewed. His eyes are so thickly lashed that when he sleeps the lashes curl against his cheeks. His eyes themselves are large, a hazel so high that in some lights they appear yellow, and are set perfectly straight along their axis. If it weren’t for the lashes, his eyes would be too impersonal. When I first met Jacob, the lashes made his eyes seem mournful or nostalgic. Later, I realized they are just hidden, like something moving in the fringes of the forest, a shape I can’t really see.

Daniel, on the other hand, has very crooked eyes. They reflect himself so well it is as if in each eye there is a smaller version of Daniel, and in each of these Daniels another, even smaller, and so on. There are as many Daniels as there is room beneath each one’s skin for another exact, slightly more compressed copy. Perhaps infinite Daniels. A Daniel at the subatomic level staring out at the incomprehensibly vast universe and asking it the same question.

Jacob chewed and I disappeared. This is how I argue; by osmosis, bowing my head and considering the barley which has been scooped hollow on one side by the serving spoon. Next to the bowl was a pot of honey, the first of the spring season’s, and next to the honey, a candle rolled from dead wax and pressed in a mold with the same hexagonal pattern as the comb. Then Daniel’s hand, covered as is his body with a nimbus of hair so fine he seems to refract the light around him. And then his fork,
two pronged; his plate, nearly empty; his wine glass, the red wine pricked with light. . . . You see how this could go, Ingrid? And I haven’t even gotten to the meat. . .

“Okay, okay,” said Daniel, holding up his hands and laughing (the smaller Daniel raising his hands and laughing, and the next beyond that, the next). “You’re right. Plus it’s been so beautiful lately.” He turned to you, propped in your basket where Thingy’s plate would have been, and rubbed one fingertip along the bottom of your archless foot. “What do you think about that?” Daniel asked you. “What do you think about going on a trip?”

You answered him, but he didn’t hear you. Instead, he lifted his wine glass as he forked his last bite into his mouth. “To Ingrid,” Daniel toasted, shifting the rabbit from cheek to cheek.

“Ingrid,” I said, lifting my own glass. Jacob swallowed. He rinsed his mouth with wine and laid his fork across his plate, considering me now as in the window behind you the tin roof of the henhouse caught the moonlight and held it there. A silver spark brightening in contrast to the mummifying candlelight. Sharp, but easily subsumed.

And so, the next day we went.

Let me tell you about the journey, which we make twice a year. First, we prepare. The men fill the packs and I get ready to leave the house. Outside the front and back doors, I make a mark in the dirt. Outside the hen house and their yard, I make a ring of crushed eggshells and draw another mark with a length of charred wood from our fire as the chickens cackle and strut for my attention. Outside the spavined tool shed, which in a previous life was used as a sty, I make a mark and many marks
around the borders of the vegetable plot—at the corn which comes to my chest and rustles silkily; at the tomato vines sprung tall this year but not well fruited; at the pepper plants, the eggplants, the beds of herbs, the cucumber vines clinging prickly to their trellis of twine; at the gourds; at the tight budded heads of lettuce. In the mud of the creek bed, I mark against flood and at the hives, at Jacob’s insistence, I mark and ask contritely—you at my hip, you remember—for them to stay a while longer, to grace us in the meadow we have made for them.

I carry you everywhere on my hip, Ingrid, so you will see the markings in the dirt and remember their shape if not their meaning, but you are restless, I understand, almost giddy in what for you is a new air every morning. You kick and arch away from my body. I put you down and you sit plump and stunned for a moment before reaching to slap at the dust, the garden soil, the scummed pie tins we use to water the hens, the spattered constellations of their shit.

It takes a long time. When we are finished the sun has already gone mean above the tree line, and the birds settled from their dawn cacophony into more practical matters—warning shrieks at the forest line, the catbird whose mate nests in our eves hawing rustily from the peak of the house to the cemetery gate and back again. Jacob is impatient. He sits at the bottom of the porch steps melting the frayed ends of his bootlaces with a lighter.

“All set?” asks Daniel. He is fondling the ears of one of the cats, the male who is sleek as a snake and looks at us suspiciously. I do not make a mark for the cats. They won’t let me near them, though they follow Daniel as he works. This one narrows his eyes when he sees us and arches his back slightly for show. He doesn’t move from the swath of sunlight where he
is squatting and when Daniel gives his head a final rub with the ball of his thumb he rumbles hoarsely with pleasure. Jacob has already shouldered his pack and set off. As we watch, he slashes the head from a Queen Anne’s lace with his stick and disappears behind the black locust that marks the head of the trail. Daniel smiles at me and shrugs. He scrubs his hands on the back of his jeans as he rises though here is nothing on his hands he needs to scrub away. Cat hair perhaps, which the cat himself leaves behind in a little gray drift as he slips over the porch railing to keep tabs on us from under the house.

We, on the other hand, are filthy. You in particular, wrapped in the cloth I use to bind you to me when I need my hands so only your head shows, but that smeared with dirt, your fine white hair darkened and matted above your right ear with something I can’t identify. I imagine how we look together. The insect drone, which I hear so constantly I don’t really hear, brightens and shifts to a higher register. You crow and fling your head forward into my breastbone. I am sweating and the places on my face where I have run my hand as I work feel stiff with salt and grime. I envision my face as I sometimes catch it in passing, reflected in the dining room mirror or blear in the thick glass of our windows: nose beaking out of increasingly exhausted cheeks, the chin too sharp, lines beginning to arc around my mouth like parenthesis.

These are bitter moments for me, before the start of any journey, but Daniel doesn’t seem to notice as he shrugs the pack higher onto his shoulders and latches the straps carefully across his chest. Jacob is out of sight, not even a blue patch of his shirt bobbing through the green and gold forest, and you, little beast, jerk, surprised by something I can’t see which you mark as it travels in the lee of the henhouse, which makes you jerk again
as you follow its progress across the yard until you finally lose it behind the cemetery fence.

“Right-o,” says Daniel. He licks his thumb and rubs it on your forehead with the same absentminded gesture he used on the cat. “Alright?” he says to me, but he doesn’t touch me and I wish for the few moments I allow myself to wish such things, that I could pull my hair over my face and leave it there.

He goes then, burrowing his fingers into his beard which is new, blonde, beginning to curl. His other arm pumps awkwardly as he mounts the slight slope. We go. Across the loud yard—hens arguing, catbird hawing, insects remarking with tireless scandal, ‘she did! she did! she did!’—out of the sun and into the cool crowning of the forest. You pipe thin notes like a song and Daniel calls out ahead of us for Jacob to wait. Just before we crest the ridge and pass out of sight of the house entirely, I turn to look over my shoulder. The yard has begun to settle with us gone. Even the hens are holing up under their hut to escape the direct sun. Golden motes glimmer above the path where we have kicked up dust in our passing and the house itself—grand but spare, porch strutted with simple columns and rising into gables once trimmed green like a living canopy, but now peeling down to the sun-bleached wood—sits as it has always sat, seemingly backward at the head of the bald, facing the mountain.

The male cat has come out from under the porch and hunkers in the grass, scrubbing his face with one paw. As we watch he startles, springing tense to all four feet. He is alert to something only he has heard which he watches as it comes again from behind the house and crosses the yard. Something you greet, seemingly ecstatic, clapping your hands and calling your high song into the suddenly silent air.

I will tell it to you as it was told to me.

In the Hall of the Mountain King, there are many families. His peoples are called by many names and come in various forms. Some are well shaped and handsome with long fair hair curling almost to the ground. Some are weak and sandy and live in terror of the wild geese that persecute them relentlessly, killing many of their number. Some of the peoples are water-dwellers and they live in the world like our world but below it. They eat deer and squirrel and wild turkey, never fish, but sometimes a child who confuses them by playing, as children do, at being a deer or a squirrel or a bird. Those they will spit and roast on their fires deep under the river, and though they recognize the mistake as soon as they strip the paper feathers from the child’s arms, they will feast on these children with great celebration as they are not a people inclined to waste.

Sometimes, when traveling, a person will come across small tracks in the mud of a creek bed, or in wintertime marked in the snow, as if from a group of children all lost together and merrily wandering. If he follows them, often enough the tracks will lead to an open cave in the cliff face, little more than a dugout slanting back into the sheer cliff wall. There the tracks will disappear as if the whole company—boys and girls, he can see here where they have skipped, here where one has veered off to snap the head from a wildflower, strip a length of birch bark from the tree—has walked straight into the mountain, not one of them missing a step.

Sometimes, people do not return from the mountains at all, or are found many years later wandering deranged through what were once familiar streets. These people never live long back among their neighbors, but while they are there they
tell fantastical stories: whole towns hidden in the mountain’s caverns, peoples whose bodies have become encrusted with gemstones—rubies winking at the corners of their eyes and amethyst glimmering like scales at the inside of their wrists—who dance around their cold blue fires and send up out of the mountain the eerie squeal of thousands of gemstones rubbing against each other. And the food! Rough rock chalices filled with wine, phosphorescent mushrooms, pale slabs of fish gleaming with butter and cakes so light and crumbly that though they spent all day eating (a single day that was months for those left behind in the foothills) they never once felt satisfied.

And the women! How soft they were under their armament, how pale and fragrant. How (and here their voices drop to whispers) when their legs were parted the tunnel there was shot with silver like a loaded vein of ore spiraling through the rock. How, when the women took them into their mouths, they afterwards spit into a little basin and what rolled there were opals, moonshot and fiery, which the women fashioned into pendants they wore around their necks and wove into their hair.

What could their poor wives do? Here were their husbands back and still in their prime, but after so many years they themselves had withered. These men seemed like strangers. Rough ghosts. They treated them like mothers and the babies they had left behind were now lank teenagers, bewildered and angry, leaning against the doorframes while their young fathers cuddled against the women’s sides and confessed.