#I can write out ideas and only illustrate enough to get the gist across

[fishyartist]

Ghost Getter :)

[boreothegoldfinch]

chapter 12 paragraph viii

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help. Though my engagement isn’t off, not officially anyway, I’ve been given to understand—gracefully, in the lighter-than-air manner of the Barbours—that no one is holding me to anything. Which is perfect. Nothing’s been said and nothing is said. When I’m invited for dinner (as I am, often, when I’m in town) it’s all very pleasant and light, voluble even, intimate and subtle while not at all personal; I’m treated like a family member (almost), welcome to turn up when I want; I’ve been able to coax Mrs. Barbour out of the apartment a bit, we’ve had some pleasant afternoons out, lunch at the Pierre and an auction or two; and Toddy, without being impolitic in the least, has even managed to let casually and almost accidentally drop the name of a very good doctor, with no suggestion whatever that I might possibly need such a thing.

[As for Pippa: though she took the Oz book, she left the necklace, along with a letter I opened so eagerly I literally ripped through the envelope and tore it in half. The gist—once I got on my knees and fit the pieces together— was this: she’d loved seeing me, our time in the city had meant a lot to her, who in the world could have picked such a beautiful necklace for her? it was perfect, more than perfect, only she couldn’t accept it, it was much too much, she was sorry, and—maybe she was speaking out of turn, and if so she hoped I forgave her, but I shouldn’t think she didn’t love me back, because she did, she did. (You do? I thought, bewildered.) Only it was complicated, she wasn’t thinking only of herself but me too, since we’d both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike—too much. And because we’d both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn’t, and couldn’t, understand, wasn’t it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn’t doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn’t it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn’t that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I’d chased for all those years.)

But, as the reader of this will have ascertained (if there ever is a reader) the idea of being Dragged Down holds no terror for me. Not that I care to drag anyone else down with me, but—can’t I change? Can’t I be the strong one? Why not?] [You can have either of those girls you want, said Boris, sitting on the sofa with me in his loft in Antwerp, cracking pistachios between his rear molars as we were watching Kill Bill. No, I can’t. And why can’t you? I’d pick Snowflake myself. But if you want the other, why not? Because she has a boyfriend? So? said Boris. Who lives with her? So? And here’s what I’m thinking too: So? What if I go to London? So? And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I’ve ever asked in all my life.] [That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him—he wasn’t painting that bird from his mind, you know? That’s a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem.] And he’s right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I’d clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted. To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there. [Do you ever think about quitting? I asked, during the boring part of It’s a Wonderful Life, the moonlight walk with Donna Reed, when I was in Antwerp watching Boris with spoon and water from an eyedropper, mixing himself what he called a “pop.” Give me a break! My arm hurts! He’d already shown me the bloody skid mark—black at the edges—cutting deep into his bicep. You get shot at Christmas and see if you want to sit around swallowing aspirin! Yeah, but you’re crazy to do it like that. Well—believe it or not—for me not so much a problem. I only do it special occasions. I’ve heard that before. Well, is true! Still a chipper, for now. I’ve known of people chipped three-four years and been ok, long as they kept it down to two-three times a month? That said, Boris added somberly—blue movie light glinting off the teaspoon —I am alcoholic. Damage is done, there. I’m a drunk till I die. If anything kills me—nodding at the Russian Standard bottle on the coffee table—that’ll be it. Say you never shot before? Believe me, I had problems enough the other way. Well, big stigma and fear, I understand. Me—honest, I prefer to sniff most times—clubs, restaurants, out and about, quicker and easier just to duck in men’s room and do a quick bump. This way—always you crave it. On my death bed I will crave it. Better never to pick it up. Although—really very irritating to see some bone head sitting there smoking out of a crack pipe and make some pronouncement about how dirty and unsafe, they would never use a needle, you know? Like they are so much more sensible than you? Why did you start? Why does anyone? My girl left me! Girl at the time. Wanted to be all bad and self-destructive, hah. Got my wish. Jimmy Stewart in his varsity sweater. Silvery moon, quavery voices. Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight. So, why not stop then? I said. Why should I? Do I really have to say why? Yeah, but what if I don’t feel like it? If you can stop, why wouldn’t you? Live by the sword, die by the sword, said Boris briskly, hitting the button on his very professional-looking medical tourniquet with his chin as he was pushing up his sleeve.]

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are. (One thing I’ll have to say for my dad: at least he tried to want the sensible thing—my mother, the briefcase, me—before he completely went berserk and ran away from it.) And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all. Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

[hoodoo12]

Familial Ties (And How To Break Them) 5/14

SFW  ~

Dawn found Pate sitting on her bed, the open half of Fuchs's book in her lap, her laptop in front of her, with a spiral notebook covered in cramped, hurried notations, some of which had been scratched out. Excitement was beginning to bubble in her chest, she thought she just might have uncovered a solution to the Rigel problem.

Early as it was, she couldn't wait another minute before filling Beej in on what she'd found, to see if he thought it might be possible. It might be grasping at straws, but it was better than nothing. Gathering everything into a pile she could transport one-handed, Pate clumsily wriggled her way off the bed and crossed to the door, gripping the knob and throwing it open with an enthusiastic cry of,

"Beej! I think I've figured it out!"

⁂

The door was thrown open, away from him, and with no support, he fell into the room. To his disappointment, she'd changed her clothing; he'd have gotten another pretty view of her panties if she'd kept that sleep shirt on! As it was, sprawled on the floor at Pate's feet, he tried to play it off cool.

"Hey, uh. Hello again!" he said as he pushed himself up. "You figured what out?"

He tried to stand, but his legs were tangled in the quilt and he struggled mightily to not fall over again.

He failed, and hit the wall.

Pate gasped when she opened her door and spilled demon all over the floor, blinking dumbly down at him. Had he fallen asleep outside her door? Warmth blossomed in her chest at the thought, but as he visibly labored to stand only to fall again she hurriedly stepped around him to deposit her burden on the end of the couch, rushing back to kneel next to him and help untangle the quilt from around his legs.

"Are you okay?" she asked worriedly.

"I'm good, baby," he replied, and didn't help at all to get her quilt off him; it was nice to feel just the thought of her hands on his legs.

Once he was released, he popped up and gave her hand up as well, pulling her to her feet; the motion made her end up against his chest. For a second, he froze, then as smoothly as he could, he stepped away.

"What did you figure out?" he asked again, gesturing towards all the paperwork she'd left on her couch.

Hearing the term of endearment again, his hand extended down to help her up, the feeling of her warm fingers encased in his cold ones.... Her pulse fluttered, and then to find herself standing against him, it was almost enough to make her forget what she'd been so eager to tell him.

Mentally shaking herself, Pate beamed at him.

"I think I know how to banish Rigel!" she announced, dropping herself onto the couch and spreading her research around so he could see it. "I couldn't sleep, so I started looking through the book, trying to find that incantation. I didn't see it, so I figure Rigel must've gotten that page."

She giggled when he rolled his eyes in an "of course . . ." sort of way.

"But! I did find this." She turned the book around to show him the page in question. "Ora infernum! Hellmouths. I used to see depictions of them in medieval illuminations all the time, but I never thought they'd be real! If Google translate is worth anything at all, it looks like they're actual living creatures who act as portals to hell. Fuchs writes that if you're able to kill the hellmouth, that portal closes. So could we do that? Push his pompous ass through a hellmouth and then kill it so he can't come back?"

And he'd thought Sandworms were bad. Those  . . . "hellmouths" looked fucking terrifying.

He took the destroyed book from her and looked at the illustration more closely. "So, are they like a sarlacc, or something? Are they a vacuum? Am I going to get sucked in?"

He knew he was peppering her with questions, but one was most important of all.

"How the fuck would we kill that thing?"

Pate rifled through her notes, sweeping a loose strand of hair out of her mouth.

"Hmm . . . Fuchs isn't totally clear on that. It looks like the only one he ever saw was already dead. All the depictions I ever saw of them in manuscripts, it didn't look like anything was being pulled in, more like the mouth is just a tunnel. A really gross tunnel down a monster's throat where you end up in hell, but just a passageway. As for how to kill it, I'm sure we can come up with something. Those tentacles of yours, couldn't they do some serious damage?"

Beetlejuice had no desire to get any body parts near that ugly thing. He looked dubiously over the illustration again.

"What prevents anyone in the mouth from just walking back out again?"

She crossed her arms, humming thoughtfully to herself.

"Also unclear... I'd guess that once whoever is in the mouth, you've got to kill the creature to seal the exit."

She leaned back against the sofa, frowning at the carpet as she pondered. How to kill such a giant monster? All she really had to go on was Hollywood and folklore. Wooden stake? That was vampires... And from what she could tell, the hellmouth was just a head. No heart to stake. Silver bullet? Possible, but it would have to be a massive bullet to kill something so big. Pate sat upright with a tiny gasp.

"Holy water," she said.

"Holy water? Like the stuff priests bathe in or whatever?" he asked. He only had a vague idea of the stuff; water was water and it wasn't his best friend. "I suppose . . . but we've got to find one of those things, and get Rigel to it. That's a lot of work, baby."

Pate shrugged, offering a tight smile. "I know. It's a long shot, but it's all we've got. Rigel's your..." she grimaced apologetically. "Brother, right? You know him better than I do, where would he go?"

He grimaced.

"Half brother," he reluctantly admitted. "My bitch of a mother's favorite out of all of us. He was always the best about dragging souls to the Netherworld."

He thought about her question for a moment, chewing his thumb nail.

"He's one of two places," he finally said. "The Vatican, because if he can get priests, that's like hitting the lottery. Or Las Vegas, because sometimes quantity over quality isn't a bad thing. If he's feeling like it, he'd definitely get more pussy in Vegas, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't get down and dirty with religious officials . . . so . . . flip a coin?"

Pate picked up on the bitter edge to his voice when he talked about his family, though she'd gotten the gist from his interaction with Rigel and the barbs tossed back and forth. She scooted closer to him on the couch while he thought, spotting some loose change she'd left on a small wooden tray table by the sofa. Plucking a quarter from the bunch she plopped back down next to him, their legs pressed flush as she held it up to show him.

"Heads Italy, tails Vegas?" she asked.

He hesitated for a beat, then gave a firm nod and Pate took a breath and flicked the coin in the air with her thumb, watching it spin.

"Vegas is always good for tail, baby," he joked, and didn't care that made her blush. The coin arced into the air, then landed on the carpet with a soft sound. He laughed at the result. "Looks like we're headed to Sin City!"

Pate rolled her eyes, grinning all the while so he wouldn't take it the wrong way. "I've never been to Nevada," she quipped. "It's hot out there, right? I'd better pack my shorts."

⁂

Pate leaned back in the driver's seat, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand drumming her thigh in time with the music playing low over the radio. She and Beetlejuice were nearing the halfway point of the nearly 2300 mile drive to Las Vegas. The GPS mounted on her dashboard said it was a 33 hour expedition one way.

Of course it would have been infinitely faster to fly, but Pate didn't think she could bear the stress of trying to get Beetlejuice through airport security. If she were honest with herself, spending the better part of two days in a vehicle with him was too tempting to resist.

Sitting still for that long, however, wasn't something the specter was accustomed or suited to. So Beetlejuice was currently reclining in the passenger seat with her tablet, playing the games she'd showed him. She glanced over at him every so often, intent upon whatever he was doing, the tip of his tongue held between his teeth as he concentrated. She smiled, her heart swelling and thumping a little harder at the sight.

This vehicle. He hated it. Hated. It. It was too small, the seat only went down to a weird, not-quite-flat position with a weird angle, the backseat was okay if he didn't mind curling up but Pate wouldn't let him ride with his feet out the windows. The tablet she'd brought along was okay; it at least passed the time and kept him distracted. She distracted him too, but she'd told him she got creeped out when he just sat still like a corpse and stared at her.

Sometimes he crawled into the back seat just so he didn't have to work as hard to hide the broomstick that occasionally showed up in his pants. The overnight accommodations? In the crappy motels? Those were a trial too, because she couldn't afford two rooms. He always pretended to sleep, but spent the nights listening to her breathe.

At long last the towering hotels and casinos of Sin City lay sprawled before them, the many hundreds of thousands of windows flashing in the bright desert sun.

As they left the highway traffic grew a bit more congested, but she was content to putter along at a snail’s pace, looking around as much as possible while still keeping an eye on the road. Pate turned a wide grin at Beej, who had clambered back into the passenger seat and slipped out from under the shoulder strap of his seatbelt. She insisted he wear it, she said it was so the cops didn’t pull them over and so the seat belt alarm wouldn’t go off the whole drive, but mostly she wanted him to be safe if something happened. She never told him that last part.  

He was leaning forward, his arms folded across the dashboard, grinning back at her. They cruised down Las Vegas Blvd, past the famed hotels and casinos.

“I booked us a room on the strip,” she told him, looking out for the unmistakable pink neon lotus outside the hotel. “Figured as long as we were going to Vegas we might as well do it right!”

He looked from one window to the next to the next to the next, sometimes catching Pate's eyes as he grinned. This place looked bright, it looked chaotic, it looked like a good place for a great time. It looked like the perfect playground for all sorts of hedonism.

"On the Strip? Which hotel? Look! Cher is still here! Can we see Cher? Huh? Or one of those shows at night when the women are naked? Huh? Pate! Let's see one of those!" Did he sound like a kid on sugar? Maybe, but he didn't care.

His hyperactive enthusiasm made her laugh as he rattled off requests, and she decided then and there that sometime in the not-too-distant future they were going to go on a real vacation. But for the time being . . .

"Slow down there, Bug," she giggled. "We've got a mission, remember? Find a hellmouth, get our hands on some holy water, and then boot your shitstain of a brother back to hell."

Beej pouted, sliding down in the seat and making her giggle more.

"But, if all goes well, I don't see any reason why we couldn't take in a show."

His exuberance returned at once, full force, and Pate laughed. His unbridled excitement must be catching, because she could feel it fizzing in her chest like bubbly champagne.

"As to our accommodations . . ." she said, pulling into the drive, the enormous Flaming Lotus in bright pinks and orange blooming from the corner of the entrance of the building on their left. "It's not the Bellagio, but it beats the hell outta Motel 6."

He couldn't help but grin widely at the nickname she'd taken to calling him during this, and this hotel?! It was just as loud and hard on the eyes as he could be, and he loved it. Pate kept an incredibly tight hold on him as she marched him through the lobby. As much as he wanted to lay down on the marble floors or explore the space, her hand clasped around his or her arm under his jacket around his waist to keep him contained was much much better. He knew what a marble slab felt like, anyway.

In the elevator, a couple with a kid gave them--him-- a look, and his dead eyed return stare hurried them off the lift without making more eye contact.

When they were gone and the two of them were alone the rest of the ride up, Beetlejuice didn't draw attention to the fact that Pate hadn't released his hand.

At the room, he was disappointed to find two beds; it was just another indication of her distrust of him. That still stung, but she had been right. They had a job to do.

 tbc