Let the Dark Flower Blossom (25 page)

Chester Stone wiggled a loose tooth with his finger.

“Well aren't you something?” Eris asked Bruno.

Said Louis Sarasine, “I'll begin, as I said. With the girl.”

Bruno thought that it was a silly question. Between
something
and
nothing
, he would always choose
something
.

Eris was wearing striped stockings.

There were times when Dibby thought that she saw Roman in the darkness. She saw him at his typewriter. And then the shadows shifted. And she knew that he wasn't real. He was a ghost of her memory. Yet, if she could create him—from will or reflex, from habit or desire—who was to say that he wasn't entirely and hadn't always been a monster of her own creation?

Louis Sarasine told to the members of the Mnemosyne Society a story.

The wind banged against the windows—Eloise, naked on her hip, had the awful feeling that somewhere someone was digging her grave.

The story—dark and terrifying, as stories told on New Year's Eve should be—was about a girl who found her mother and father dead.

Susu had a very silly name.

Said Louis, “The girl walked along a dirt road to her house on an October evening. The house was dark. She stood in the garden looking up at the windows. An apple fell from a tree. A bird flew from a branch. She waited. She waited. And then she went in the house. She took the stairs in the darkness. She called out; no one answered. She went from room to room. Calling out. And then she stopped calling.

Eris apologized to Liz, where had the time gone?

Eloise was the one who found the bodies.

Kafka barked.

Eris packed up her laptop computer and collected into an oversized leather bag: her tape recorder, her cell phone, keys, a glove, coins, butterscotch candies, a lipstick, another glove, that she had during the course of the visit spread out across the table to mix with Bruno's clutter of Legos, colored pencils, plastic dinosaurs, and a much-prized grimy white feather. Eris shrugged into her coat. It was blue and furry. Bruno reached out with his damp little hand to touch it.

Liz asked Eris as the girl rose to go, did she have big plans for the night?

Louis said, “What happened next? I confess: I don't know. Her story is unfinished. She won't allow it to end. She tells me the story. I listen.
By day we live in the real world; yes, there is such a place. But at night we wind our way through a labyrinth of her creation.”

Eris said that she hated New Year's Eve, and wasn't it stupid? the idea of it; of one year ending and another beginning? It drove her bananas. It really did. She liked to think of the revolution of the planets. Slow, dull, and incomprehensible: like the best novel. It neither began nor ended.

Liz said good-bye to Eris. Bruno took both his mother's hands in his. The girl smiled and pretended that this was adorable. And then Eris said good-bye to the boy and his mother and went off down the street, happy to be free of them, and sad too.

The Mnemosyne Society met once a year, on New Year's Eve. They began long ago with a commitment to the theoretical examination of memory. Oh, but as the years passed, these great men found little and ever-diminishing comfort in theory. They had become, bit by bit: older, whiter, fatter or skinnier, more wanting of story than discourse, more desirous of desire than disproof of the immutable substance of dreams. Memory had long since become remembrance. And so it was that when Louis Sarasine told of the girl who became his wife, who led him nightly through a labyrinth, twining her way in the darkness with a knotted rope of story; binding him with her noose; each man felt looped in the loop himself; bound at the wrist and blindfolded. His bruises were real, or at least real enough; for he had heard a story about truth and beauty.

Zigouiller slept on his stomach, like a hero hiding his fatal flaw.

“I had a recent case,” Louis Sarasine said. “No doubt you saw it on the news?—a young man stood accused of rape and murder. Three girls were found, each one packed in a suitcase: one suitcase left by the side of a road; one thrown in a lake; one in a train station. There was circumstantial evidence, but he claimed that he had no memory of the events. He passed polygraph tests. He never broke nor faltered in his denials. He was candid, young, and credible. His sincerity confounded even his most certain accusers. He might have gone free; he might not have gone to trial—but there was another girl, a girl who had survived. She had been found wandering the woods, but she was so traumatized that she couldn't speak for months after, let alone recall specific details, nor could she identify her attacker, until seeing his picture on television. My task was to discredit the girl and engage the sympathy of the jury toward the accused. Which, of course, I did.”

Zola, sleeping on the silk nightdress, dreamed that she was a girl and that Zigouiller was in love with her.

Liz and Bruno walked along a snowy street with Kafka.

Eris, who was writing a paper, though no actual paper was involved, on the topic of postfeminist ergodic technoiconography vis-à-vis la morte de la novel as a phallogocentric assault and thusly thrust
conversely upsidedownedly: the feet-first kicking breech birth of the eco-polyphonic carnival text, was kinda sorta disappointed that she hadn't gotten to meet Salt.

Salt knew that he had a book within him.

There was only one problem.

Beatrice pared a potato.

Salt was suffering from writer's block.

Suffering?

Susu closed the door to the balcony.

“The victim could not recall the crime, and the accused could not recall committing the crime,” said Louis Sarasine. “Yet a crime had been committed. The case was like a game of telephone; the circuitry of the act had given way to myriad possibilities, not negating reality, but creating subsets to it, inexhaustible what-ifs and why-nots? And it occurred to me; I had a belated revelation, not in the courtroom, but later, on the plane home, delayed by a snowstorm—”

Beatrice set the timer on the oven.

Inj was naked.

Roman was dead.

Dibby had quick small fingers.

Kafka licked the salt from his paws.

“—I understood how my wife had helped me,” said Louis. “She told me her story. Each time that she told the story, she changed it. She believed in each version of the story that she told. I understood; I learned from her how it is that the truth is less relevant than a belief in the truth.”

Eloise and Zigouiller slept on through the darkening afternoon.

Dibby wanted to know how the story would end.

It was not a story.

Beatrice knocked on the bedroom door; did anyone want to go for a walk in the woods?

Inj buttoned her blue jeans.

Salt had gone dry.

Bruno licked peanut butter from his fingers.

Said Louis Sarasine, “A story is a labyrinth, and all paths lead to the monster. Who is the monster? Is it the storyteller? A good storyteller
must
be a monster. The best stories tell of the worst of human nature. The worst, our broken laws. Our nightmares realized. To write of such things, an author must commit the act himself; if only on the page. And what of us? What of the readers? In the real world, we read our newspapers. We butter our bread. We read of murder, and we are sickened. But in fiction, in the story: we want the dead girl. So—who is the monster? You? Me? Am I guilty? Are you, dear friends, guilty? Because you want to know about a dead girl? Am I guilty for wanting to know what my wife found in the dark house years ago? I want her story. My client told me his memories, that's all. I listened. I defended not him, but his dreams. I defended the story. I defended the right of a dreamer to imagine the worst. I have read the oldest most beautiful stories in the world—tales of rape, destruction, and murder. I have found the beauty in violence. In my mind I have killed so many girls. Yet, I never lifted a hand. I never held a knife in anger, but I did imagine the knife in my hand. Am I guilty? Because what one dreams is always possible? Am I guilty of reading a story?”

Bruno danced to a song on the radio.

Liz at her laptop computer set on the kitchen table, while waiting for the water to boil for macaroni and cheese, was tapping out a particularly relevant passage in her new novel. She was wearing a sweater knitted of organic cruelty-free Peruvian wool. She lived dedicated to the principle of a cruelty-free life. The impossibility of this had not yet occurred to her.

Susu Zigouiller went down to the hotel bar.

In the winter woods walked Inj and Beatrice.

Salt had a story within him, but he had no mechanism—neither ghost nor machine—by which to tell it.

Schell was not sure what was real and what was not.

Louis Sarasine said, “Eloise was not sure what was unreal and what was not. This was the gift—or the grace—that helped me prove, if not the innocence, then the lack of guilt of a monster.”

In the kitchen, Salt ate bread and marmalade.

Schell closed the door to his study.

Beatrice told Inj the names of birds.

Said Louis, “I want to know what will happen. Each time she tells me I want to know. Hearing the story does not diminish my desire. I am looking for a clue, a twist, a turn, an exit. I am searching for a fallen candle, a hidden letter, a lost key. I want more. I want to know more.”

Salt left a sticky knife on his plate.

Schell picked up his pen.

The black cat went from room to room.

Louis Sarasine went to the window and looked out.

“There is more to the girl's story,” he said. “You see, she had a brother.”

Salt opened the door to the study.

Inj chased the dogs round and round through the pine trees.

And fell laughing in the snow.

Said Louis Sarasine, “It is the story of a brother and a sister.”

Schell put down his pen.

The girls talked about actresses they liked. And how nice it was to be able to talk about actresses they liked without very smart men telling them they should talk about more meaningful things.

The black cat brushed back and forth against the white nightdress, draped over a chair.

“Many years ago, when the brother and sister were small, they lived in an old farmhouse. There was a garden. Beyond the garden: a creek, a path, a wilderness, the woods. The children had a story,” said Louis Sarasine. “They kept it in a box. They were writing a story. They wrote it in the woods. There was a key to the box, and the brother liked to lock up the story. Eloise told me that she had lost the key. She said that everything that she told me was true. And I did not believe her.”

Salt, seeing his host for the first time, offered his hand. He asked in a manner both sincere and ironic, “May I call you Shel?”

“Eloise did not lie,” said Louis. “Does this mean that she told me the truth? She told me about the night she found her father and mother. She told me that there was a chocolate cake on the kitchen table. Or maybe it was an apple pie. She told me that her father's typewriter was green. She told me about a wooden box. Or maybe it was made of tin? She told me about the story that she and her brother were writing, though he always held the pen.”