'Hello, Ubu'

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part

of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Sometimes I think I write like I paint. And I’m never satisfied with my painting; it never feels finished, never whole. Too decorative. Or right when I feel I might’ve found something profound, something else always comes along and takes the colors away, shapes and shadows, holding them like a shrieking sparrow just outside my grip. I’m going to try and hold onto my whole palette here though, I’m going to try and hold firm on the brush, I’m going to try and see ‘The End’ written on a canvas. I have to paint you a portrait of Miss Viceroy.

I already knew what happened to people who went to see her. Or rather, I’d heard stories. Whispers. Like this one. I knew the mechanisms of the visit, I knew what to say, I knew when to be silent and when might be best to smile. This was expected. I was prepared.

April. A Wednesday morning, by design. Basket of offerings, glass of amontillado for the door. Wrapped in red. The amontillado, not me. This was just the way things were supposed to be.

Her house hung there, like one of those cobwebs that you only notice when you’re thinking about it, or thinking about nothing in particular and your eye wanders to a quietly occupied corner. A leaf, dragged in on a gust and swept behind a door by chance that just becomes part of the scenery, a touch of local flavor, both eternal and immoveable, and expected to disappear at any moment. It was off a main street, still suburbia, not a hut in the woods or a wizard’s cave. Just a little house, set back from the road a bit behind the willows that edged her gate, struggling always for water in this climate. I really don’t know how they managed to grow at all. I was told once that willows will regrow from as little as a tiny twig or branch snapped off and stuck in marshy ground. I wondered as I walked past them whether these had grown like that, or from some seed, clones or newborns (newborn still, though old). I wondered about her soil, somehow able to support them.

The house is regular, and red. Not old enough to be considered wicked, or haunted by itself yet, but stories grew all the same. Someone said she lived in Spain once, and grew attached to a certain stucco in the light of the Spanish sun, and hired an artist (or perhaps an alchemist, some say) to recreate the feeling here. I can’t say for sure. But it’s one of the stories people tell.

I knew knocking was unnecessary. I set the amontillado down on the porch in a niche by a Herm so old I could only assume it was authentic. I spent a moment looking at it, judging what remained of its features against its age, what was left and what was broken off to mystery and guesswork. I couldn’t place the depiction, but lingered on the eyes and the gash halfway down, struck by and between those alleged portals to the soul (does an old statue still have a soul?) and the open question of genitals, lost like a rose to time or desecration. Just an effigy of the ages.

Wine in place, I walked inside.

Dust, and the smell of pastry or pasta, possibly old cake. There was something stale in its sweetness, like old flowers, or perhaps I was projecting because finally it felt like I was going where I expected. Suburbia seemed necessary now, to cover this secret, or at least as a moat of sleepers succumbed to the idle on the outside. Suburbia, just two feet back beyond the Herm, and further than ever before.

A wall of portraits in speckled glass, adding beauty spots to smooth oil faces and moles to dresses and tasteful singular nudes. Three umbrella stands, all empty. A wastebasket of clocks, and a stuffed python, its eyes somehow seeming still to glitter, though long since fallen to dust and beetles. It made me expect to smell sulphur on the air, but again, only old bread. Or cakes. Maybe wafers. Hoc est corpus.

There’s a little winding hallway after that, still portraited, beyond the python, like a fissure into the depths of the house. All dark. Walking down the corridor I feel the carpet, just a little too soft beneath my feet, even in shoes, and look down to see a design of men wrestling serpents, or women with serpent forms. I can’t quite tell if they're wrestling or running though, or somewhere fused. Decoration can still leave a little to mystery, I suppose.

There’s a curtain, thin and shifting, and I’m approaching it on autopilot at this point. I can hear the floor beneath me, see a vision of the room inside. I can just make out the cage. It all becomes a little more real and a little more like a dream at the same time. I can see a shadow twitch across the veil, and then I’m there, I’m in.

I know not to look around yet, and keep my body angled left, towards the cage. A moonfaced barn owl stares back at me from within, eyes both baleful, and bland and blank. Little black holes, eating every light around to power themselves up like batteries, little living black holes sucking sparks like gnats out of the air. Though now they say that black holes also let their captive light back out, so who knows.

‘Hello, Ubu,’ I say to him, knowing this is the right thing to do. In front of him on a thin music stand sits the book I was expecting, and I want to see it before I perform the next move. A fine green vellum binding, holding a grain like hieroglyphics, letting loose the yellow of the aged flesh beneath, grooves from endless fingers grazing across the cover like friends visiting a well worn path through the woods. I try and sigh, like I feel I should, but nothing comes out and Ubu just rustles. I flip through the pages like I’m handling blind kittens and see the inks and stains and marks - vertical signatures across the center of each page and creased over once, creating a stamp. Creating a plethora of forms, all tending towards the anthropomorphic but in the most mocking of ways, eyes of Y’s and looping limbs of G’s and L’s and heads of N’s and O’s. I trace a few with my fingers, just a hair’s breath away, and I wonder if it can feel me back. I know I don’t have to sign it yet, and so does Ubu, who shifts his feet and turns his head, in boredom or disdain. He’s seen this before, I know. I’ve been told.

‘Did you bring the nettle cakes?’

Her voice is like a harpsichord behind me, and I turn and finally see Miss Viceroy.

I told you I wanted to paint you a portrait of her, and so the first thing I truly have to decide to do here is to describe her or not. I mean what she looked like. I think the eyes make or break a portrait - the face can be any form and say anything, but to take the eyes and put them in a painting, they’re the ones that decide the living from the dead. But I couldn’t see Miss Viceroy’s eyes, so I can’t even attempt to sketch them yet. They’re hidden behind the brim of her hat, but I can feel them still and they feel like Ubu. Ubu but kinder, perhaps. The kindness might come from the smile though, for she is smiling, and that I can see. She’s older than one might expect for a ‘Miss’, but I expected this. She’s dressed in white, and with the formality of the garb and the saintly mild sardonic smile, she has all the air of a nun. In my mind, I immediately call her sister.

There’s an opal at her chest, and perhaps this takes away a bit of the saintliness, for I wouldn’t expect the divine to be bedecked in such a fitful roving globe of color. It hangs from a silvery, liquid-looking chain that seems much too thin to support it, right between her throat and breastbone. I have a moment of nausea as the color within swoops into a comma and quivers before developing back into the rest. I’m not sure of the light-source that could justify that.

Is that a portrait? It’s hardly a sketch and I’m not helping you picture her as she really seems, sitting in that room. Imagine, please: a praying mantis grown gray ministering to desert furniture, teaching chairs to be grandmotherly and end-tables to accept; a dried crown of jasmine set atop an onyx sphinx just begging for the burning mullein branches dragging ceremonially toward it; a paean to poetic recombinations and restitutions of the flesh laid out in granite and gold upon an altar and operating table of rose light and glittering nurses; and just an old woman in a dated sunhat and cotton dress. All the same, that’s her.

I remember the nettle cakes, and as I take them out of the basket she settles back as though she had been on edge for a moment. I remind myself she knows this dance, but she has a face fit mainly for Butoh and suddenly my hands feel awful pulling out ‘cookies and cakes for granny’ like Little Red and suddenly I feel all too much the wolf, hairy and panting, breaking into an old woman’s house, even if it is expected, even with all those signatures looping back on each other into souls. The moment passes and I relax.

I set the nettle cakes on the ottoman before her and can see a corona of grey-green crumbs around it from everyone before me that had taken the same steps with the same cakes. Offerings all over again again. I feel her smile, I imagine I imagined I could hear the opal laugh in the same manner. She takes a cake and throws it deftly out the window set behind her chair. Her head cocks, twitches up at me and I see a glint of large eyes, and she speaks.

‘Have we done this before?’

‘Yes.’

She smiles and settles back in satisfaction, nibbling a nettle cake. I told you, I knew what to say.

‘Good. Good. And Ubu?’

‘I didn’t sign yet. I don’t want to make that choice just yet.’

‘That’s the way,’ and there’s a touch of indulgence in her voice.

‘I’ve come to see stars,’ I say and I hear Ubu rustle like her dress.

‘Only with the falling of dusk,’ she says, and I feel a little flip in my gut somewhere, knowing where we’re going.

‘Does the sun neither rise nor set?’

She nods, rearranging herself with a throaty grunt, unexpected from her paper-dry form, before responding.

‘With an eye on either side of the form, the question answers itself by ceasing to be asked.’

I sit, as she gestures with one hand towards an open seat. It smells like Pacific rain and a bit of cardboard and the hum of an electric cello.

‘At the door?’

‘Sack, fortified.’

‘Before him, or before her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And the eyelids?’

‘Still holding eyes.’

She nods, and turns towards the window, her mouthed curled up in an expressionless little gesture, and from what I can see of her eyes they’re as black and blank as her owl’s, but I know that’s not true. I wait for the next line, but she’s just sitting, swaying softly in an imaginary breeze like lace in a rocking chair. As the distortion of the moment stretches I shift uncomfortably. The script didn’t dictate pauses to breathe like this. She’s still silent. Eventually Ubu makes a soft noise and she seems to come to. Her eyes rolls towards me in her stationary skull and she speaks again.

‘And the horse?’

‘Ready to be stabled,’ I say with relief, and hoping it’s true.

‘Why?’

‘We’re helping him.’

She nods again, and returns her eyes to the window, again without moving her head.

Another pause, and I don’t know if the script I was taught just lacked stage directions or if the game is off-kilter. I worry again I’m harassing an old woman.

‘Where would you see stars?’ she says, and I respond

‘In the palaestra, to begin.’

And now she scares me and I’m too much the wolf no more, for what she says next isn’t what I was told she would say.

‘Is that really where it begins?’

She’s fully faced to me now and I see a pianist’s fingers in her facial features and the pallor of a poet framing hectic dark eyes. They remind me of a horse, but one I’d never dare ride. Bristling eyelashes like boot-black brushes, and a hideous bow of a mouth nearly without lips yet drawn in in fat, rich crimson. Fanny Hill appraising the outfit of Little Lord Faunterloy like a critic at a used book store.

‘Tell me, is that where it begins?’

I look around quickly, as if expecting some hint, a map on the walls perhaps, or for Ubu to speak and gently nudge my language. Nothing, but I do see a hyacinth in a bell jar seemingly filled with honey, and several insect specimens pinned with Lalique hairpins.

‘I’m asking you a question.’

She reaches out and starts crumbling bits of nettle cake in a circle around the ottoman, reinforcing the echoes and traces already there and I have a doubling. I see the unexpected questions, I see the same circle traced again. I don’t know whether to answer or wait for a realignment between expectation and reality.

She looks up at me like a vulture and I weigh my options. I’m spared responding for a moment by Ubu, who finally speaks and says

‘Everything he became.’ in the dullest little sub-lunar voice I’d ever heard.

‘What ends the palaestra?’ says Miss Viceroy and suddenly we’re back on track. I wonder what say Ubu had in the script.

‘Nothing ends a circle,’ I say, sounding like an ass, a pompous ass, like I’m proud to know the words again.

‘Then what begins a circle?’ and now she’s making new lines again. ‘Silence doesn’t speak for you. Tell me.’

I look at her in desperation. ‘Please…’ I whisper, not wanting to do anything off script other than beg. I expected to maybe weep here, or scream, maybe laugh, but not beg. All the wolf all the more gone.

Her expression in response is as benign as cancer.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I say.

‘Begin with your name,’ she says and suddenly she’s back on script and I feel my pulse quicken.

‘I have no name,’ I say with pride.

A quirk of the mouth, she says

‘Well that’s odd. My name is Ida. Who told you to have no name to me?’

I flounder, repeat myself, ‘I have no name.’

She scoffs, and stands up so quickly I almost throw myself from my seat. She grabs a crystal decanter swarming with filigree and a wooden bowl hardly more than a crudely-hewn lichen and sets them atop the ottoman on the nettle cakes. She pours a viscous pearly liquid into the bowl and looks up at me while keeping her shoulders raised.

‘Milk,’ she says, ‘My own. See? No need not to claim a name.’

She grabs my hand and holds it over the bowl and squeezes like a snapped tree branch, and from somewhere (I really don’t know where) a drop of blood falls out of me into the liquid, into the milk. It sits on top like an emblem before sinking through the cream skin surface and drowning out of sight.

‘You’ve bled before,’ she says through her fence-grated hat brim, ‘But not how you expected. Don’t make me read your liver in your tongue as well.’

She looks at me.

‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ I say, the first truly honest thing I’ve said since I got here. Scripts aren’t honest. They’re not supposed to be.

‘Finally,’ she says, ‘Some meat to pick off the bones.’ I regret having already pictured her as a vulture.

She dangles herself forward in a graceless artful flop, arms and shoulders hanging and dragging like a bunraku puppet and she affects a sea-shanty voice, some awful Ahab twisting her fairy-or-fury form,

‘And why came ye, eh? Saw fit to become who ye are, make yer Papa proud?’

Her leer is evil to me.

‘How can ye be where ye’are if ye don’t know who ye’is?’

‘Should I speak as I would?’ I ask, emboldened by my previous digression. But still seeking permission, still seeking an allowance.

‘Naturally,’ says Ubu behind me, his voice crisp. I blink, nod.

‘I don’t know anymore,’ I say.

‘What did ye imagine?’

‘I’m not honestly sure,’ I say, remembering daydreams of myself and the forms of a woman, unknown yet well-rehearsed. ‘It seemed I was supposed to come here to become myself. Or find myself. To agree to something. But I didn’t sign the book yet because I know I don’t have to. Yet.’

She’s just an old woman again, nodding, and she seems wearier than ever. I wonder how many times she’s done this, and if this is the first time she’s done it like this or if it’s really like this every time.

‘Anyone could be me,’ she says, and I know I wouldn’t ever share this part to someone else to come, like maybe no one shared it to me. Better to preserve the myth and allow room for novelty. Was anyone ever truly changed by something they already knew?

‘I don’t want to be you,’ I say. ‘I just want to be me.’

She looks me sharp in the eye.

‘What begins a circle, then?’ she says, and pivots away towards a door I hadn’t noticed before. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘Become.’ And she beckons me through the door as she opens it and slips like a diligent bud through it. I follow, us both leaving Ubu behind.

I find her in a sky-blue tiled courtyard lightyears from the neighborhood outside her house, and suddenly I imagine I’ll smell sulfur again, and pine, hear libation bearers wailing and tearing their hair amidst dresses fit only for expression in lily-white leech-fields.

‘I grow dittany of Crete here,’ she says, making full eye contact for the first time, passing between pillars and planters beneath a dusky sunset. I can smell it in the air but don’t know what to say, so stay silent until she speaks again.

‘They used to have to train goats to walk on two legs to pick it, because it grew so far up on the mountainsides.’ She runs her hands over a wooly green plant, like so many crystalized newt-legs purling around a twig. ‘They’d have to know how to balance their legs, and hold their arms out like a crucified man to stay straight, and pick the dittany with their tongues without destroying the roots, or all was lost.’ I see now her dress shows her shoulder tops like some form of liquid Venus de Milo regrowing itself like an octopus through every shadow. ‘And now I have it in my garden. From snowy Crete to sunny here.’

‘I don’t think Crete is snowy,’ I say.

She laughs. The least thing I was prepared for.

‘What’s so funny? I thought this was business to you.’

Her eyes glitter.

‘It’s all Greek to me,’ she says and laughs again. I start to notice the chameleons as she takes off her hat and lets loose an eruption of smoky hair, all black and gray and dust, yet living, more than I’ve seen life, even in her Dittany.

She moves across the courtyard to a fountain wreathed in jasmine, and singing frogs invisible in the foliage. Predator’s eyes, direct, none of the ambivalence of her owl, staring out like hooked arrows over Ozymandias cheekbones.

‘What can birth itself?’ she asks, a now unexpected hearkening back to what we were supposed to be doing.

‘Nothing,’ I say as she sits like a sphinx over her fountain, sunset painting her not in dusky grays like she said but the florid pastels of the last-ditch screams of a pigment proclaiming itself.

‘Exactly,’ she says with that smile again. And then suddenly she’s back to it.

‘Would you bathe with me?’ she asks and I start to undress in expectation as she crawls into her pool like a water moccasin with all the appeal of a sunning otter.

‘I deny you, no,’ I say as I’m supposed to as I move towards the pool, spitting frogs from stone mouths. The chameleons show themselves to me again.

‘Would you be as one?’ she says.

‘Nothing in the palaestra ends in a circle,’ I say, slipping into the water.

I remember cooking cookies for granny, nettle cakes for the witch in the wood. Who was in a house, in suburbia. Not a hut or a wizard’s cave. And now I see her before me in two forms, the flesh and the rippled statue beneath the water, a reflection, just a sign of the truth, a hint of forms to be, and I say

‘No,’ I say, ‘I didn’t sign with Ubu.’

And she laughs, or it’s frogs, or maybe she’s laughing with frogs, as she says, ‘Only fools sign a name in stone thinking it sticks. Every form changes. Nothing patient is stable.’

and she touches me, and I see hieroglyphics again, not a word but a form that sees an idea and transmits it by mime, outside the language that traps things into set forms.

‘Nothing ends in a circle,’ she says, singing with the frogs.

Just a portrait of Miss Viceroy, our friend, without a name, set with eyes.

‘In the palaestra,’ she says as I feel myself move like her opal

seeing light

a comma,

no nausea now

And I think I hear Ubu chime three like a grandfather clock and realize why she tossed time away in the hallway

‘What have we?’ says she, ‘What have we who says we?’

‘Just the scent of Jasmine.’

‘And where is the scent of jasmine?’

‘In the stars. Only in the stars.’

‘Because it doesn’t last?’

‘Nothing ends in a circle.’

And she nods.

‘I once saw a hyena hold a ball in Oz,’ I say in the water. ‘We erected a new Queen to rule over all of her spots and stripes. A new language for a new territory.’

‘Did you dance with her?’

‘We’re having a conversation now. You know I can’t dance.’

‘We’re dancing now.’

The water is red. From her, or me, or the willows, or their soil, ruts of conversation run so deep into the ground that they bleed.

‘Do you know me now?’

‘I only know myself.’

And just like that, nothing ends in a circle. Jasmine vines, owls in cages. A little bit of Ubu, a little bit of myth.

We hung there in the water of her fountain, some amniotic glitch, not waiting to be born because we already saw the face of the earth. Like one of those cobwebs spun by a spider only seen as a fearful widow at the door, that you only notice when you’re trying not to think about it, or thinking about no one in particular and your eye wanders to what she lost. A leaf from a ragged willow, all along the vines, dragged in on a gust and swept behind a script by a design that just becomes part of the scenery, a touch of cultural flavor, both eternal and immoveable, and expected to disappear at any moment.

We were off the beaten path, still in suburbia, not a hut in the woods or an ancient oasis. Just a little us, set back from the road a bit behind willows creating a gate that says ‘Go forth and know thyself,’ struggling to stick a root in this climate. I really don’t know how any of us managed to grow at all. I was told once that we will regrow from the same point from as little as a tiny twig or branch snapped off and stuck in marshy ground. I wondered now whether we had not grown like that, not simply from seed, clones or newborns (newborn still, though old), but some older mechanism of conversation still. I wonder about our soil, whether it is enough to support us.

Our house is regular, and red. Just a bloody body. Not old enough to be considered wicked, or haunted by itself yet, but stories can grow lichens on us at any time. Someone said there’s a book we all sign, that we have to. That we write our forms in stone to recreate the feeling of ourselves here. Some sort of script. I can’t say for sure. But it’s one of the stories people tell.

I said I’d hold this until the end for once, I’d hold the brush to paint ‘the end’ on this canvas, but my brush is gone; but I’m still painting a portrait. And nothing really says ‘the end’ here. Nothing ends in a circle.