The Seventh Mansion Read online

  * * *

  It’s late when Jo pulls up to his house, the road pitch-black aside from the headlights. Whose truck is that? Leni asks, craning to look at the SUV in the driveway. Xie frowns. I don’t know. Ruh-roh, Jo says, eyebrows high, your dad have a hot date over? A hot date with a gun rack? Xie stares at the SUV, knee jumping. We can go in with you, Leni offers. No one, aside from FKK, has ever been in his house. No, it’s fine. See you guys tomorrow. He gets out of the car, walks up the path. In the living room Erik on the couch, a stranger beside him. Baseball cap, flannel shirt. Filthy jeans. Hey, Erik says. You’re home. Yeah. Nearly a dozen bottles open on the table. This is Jason. From work. Jason lifts his hand; Xie echoes the gesture. He goes into the kitchen. Two bowls in the sink. That your soup I just ate? Jason calls. Pretty damn good. Thanks, Xie replies. He takes a slice of bread from the box, folds it over a banana, walks back through the living room. Jason leaning for the remote on the table, You mind if I change the channel? Erik waving his hand, eyes half-mast. Xie has not seen his father drunk in a long time. Go right ahead. On the screen: some woods. A man and a boy in yellow jackets. The man saying, Steady now. Smooth shift of gun from side to shoulder, the boy turning his head to sight the shape staring straight at the camera. It’s so quick. Shit, Erik says. Jason whistles. That’s a beauty. Xie out the back door, screen slamming, over the garden fence, cold slosh through the stream. Feet thrashing through the leaves. Windless. Go all the way to the east end of the woods, where the stream weaves beneath the bridge. The road amputating the breast of the woods, a thick bar of trash lining the concrete where it meets the dirt. Stopping near to scream. Scream and scream and scream. The mink and the library and MacAdams and his mother on the phone and Jo’s big house and the men in the strip mall and the scar on Nova’s face and the vanished moss and the blister on his palm and the way the body folded. The head hitting a stone. The sound of the head hitting. The boy lowering the gun to look. So serious. Pale face. Tentative smile. The legs going out. The eyes rolling back. The stranger inside his house. His own father letting him in. Not knowing better. The buck’s head hitting the dirt. You got ’im. Mist of blood in the air. You did good, son. You did so good.

  * * *

  Zigzag through the woods. Throat sore. He knows it’s stupid. A deer getting shot on TV, an idiot on the couch, who cares. You do. His mother used to say it was just depression. From her blood to his. Something as simple as sadness, easier to understand than grief. For what. Not for himself. If it was only that, he would just. Die. How much easier it would be. If it started with you, you could stop it. Stop yourself. But it’s much bigger than you. Xie looks at the house from the trees, a light on in the kitchen. Night soft on your face. Your back against a tree. The sound of a car starting on your road. Jason gone but you don’t move. The shot is still inside the house. It is almost everywhere you go. A thick rain falls, clouds knit hard together. No light from the moon but that old light, behind you, you’ve seen it every night for a year. You’ve watched it. It has watched you. The birch it touches luminous and if it is touching you then you, too, must be luminous. It raises the hair on your arms. And the thought hits you as the light hits you as the rain hits you. Get up. Walk the other way. Not to the bridge or to the house or to the road leading into town but the other direction, the only way you have not yet gone. The ground softening with every step, bark peeling in sheets from the trunks. Roots gathering the water, the wood always feeding itself, with the sky and the air and from every death that settles here, holding the land together, holding what is above to what is below; the chaffinch and the primrose, the wood sorrel and the violets, the bluebells and the woodcock. The crows. The pale moths with wings edged in black and brown and white, clinging to the serrated leaves. Witch’s brooms of dead twigs spread between the branches. The velvet mosses and ferns pulsing with beetles and worms, army of light and decay, of night and air. The husks of the winged seeds of the trees themselves, rotting since last spring in the seams of the earth. You can see it in pieces or all together, the parts or the whole, a chaotic encyclopedia in every square inch. Xie burrows deeper through the birch. In the city it was bright all the time, everywhere; but here you can track a single light for miles. He slips on a twig, his shoes soaked, hood heavy on his head. Soon he is at the edge, the last line of trees toeing the submerged grass. The light brightest. The light is brightest here.

  * * *

  The church is tiny, taller but no bigger than his own house, planted at the far end of the field. Dark stone and thin windows graze the steep red roof. Silver spire. Peaked wooden door, laced with rusting ironwork. A round window above, and above that the lamp, white light frosting the crumbling steps. Xie puts his hand on the door, pushing: it swings open. Inside there is no one. Two rows of pews, five deep from the altar, an enormous painted cross. A marble font. Stone floor. Enclave with a wooden gate to the right, rows of candles, a handful of them lit before a tall portrait of Mary, head tipped to the baby Jesus against her breast. A piano in the choir loft above the entryway. Stained glass all around: red, blue, white. An angel outlined in lead. To the left, a table with a leather registry, and behind it the confessional, as slim and severe as a coffin. His clothes drip; he turns in a circle of water, looking. He wipes his face with his hands. Holding his breath. Don’t think for a sec. He can feel it, whatever it was in the woods. Stands very still. It’s here. Right here. Turning back to the door, how did he miss it? A painted cabinet, dark gold, taller than Xie, pressed beneath a sloped stone arch. A little hole, also gold, for a key. Could be coats inside, or whatever priests wear, or Bibles, or. Nothing. Could be nothing. The rain stops. Such a silence, deeper than in the woods, pure, unrelieved. Xie takes a step; he strokes the belly of the cabinet, where the wood swells. He presses his thumb against the keyhole. Bends. Inhales. He knows the smell: cold, earth, bone. The way a smell can be like a sound, calling. The key hangs from a nail behind the case, its long chain swinging slightly against the stone. He slips his hand in the gap, takes the key, fits it into the lock.

  How to describe the beloved?

  Behind the door a pane of glass, and behind the glass, a body. Full skeleton dressed in an elaborate suit of silver. Knee bent, hip cocked, one hand pointing to the sky, the other settled on the hilt of an enormous sword. Head turned downward in its nest of metal to gaze at Xie. Silver boots to the thigh; long pleated skirt; breastplate in a Roman style. Narrow windows edged in heavy filigree cut over the arms, the shins, the chest, revealing the slim yellowed bones beneath. A plaque affixed to the bottom of the glass: St. Pancratius. Martyred 304 A.D. He traces the name. Pancratius. P. So. This is you. Silver cape strapped with more gold to his shoulders, falling in thick folds to his boots, a half dozen chains linked across the breastplate like necklaces, hung with medals. A circle of gold affixed to the back of the helmet, reaching a foot in all directions, as if the skull were a star crowned in fire. Everywhere the metal etched, tooled, stamped in layer upon layer of exquisite designs, not overwhelming the austerity of the bones but highlighting their merciless perfection. Those eyes, pitch-black in the low light. The body liquid in all its hardness, something not fixed but fixing, from boot to crown, the entire room on itself. A warrior. A prince. A king. Flames flicker in the glass. Everything moving and nothing moving. Everything alive and everything still.

  * * *

  He is on his knees at the foot of the cabinet. Face wet. Time sweeps its shadows through the room; wax vanishes into smoke. He thinks nothing; he is aware only of the body, its beauty, its supremacy. How to survive it. A pain, sharp, in his chest. Spreading. Arms eyes thighs head hands heart. Heavy. Full of your own living. The body watching. Knowing you. You stay there. Breathing. As hard as you have ever been. The windows half bright at four in the morning. Eventually someone will come, whoever takes care of this place, of the saint; he has to wipe his prints from the glass, the saliva from his lip. He shuts up the body, slow, eyes on the skull until. Gone. Key in the lock. A sigh behind t
he wood. The rest of the church jumping into place. Swallow. Slip out the door, down the steps, dew in the grass, sparkling against his shoes. He falls back into the ferns. A whisper in the branches. Help me. A shock of crows bursting from the leaves.

  * * *

  He rides his bike an hour into town, to the library near the university, where he checks out every book he can find with Pancratius’s name: Lives of the Saints, The Golden Legend, Jewels of the Catacombs. There are dozens of images, not only of the body but of the fourteen-year-old boy to whom the body supposedly once belonged, statues and etchings and icons showing the saint with a lamb at his feet or in his arms, smiling, blond, obedient. Xie in the woods, books open in the dirt, studying each page. How many millions of people have known Pancratius’s name, kneeled in his churches. How many believed he had existed and still did. In some way. A soul, a spirit, a body unbound by death. A channel to the sublime. All those believers calling on a boy for help, to cure a headache, a cramp, a disease, to destroy an enemy, to recall a wayward son. To simply. Intercede. Pancratius just one of hundreds of relics dug up from the Roman catacombs and displayed in churches all over Europe, bodies not dressed in armor like P., but draped in velvet and silk and lace, loaded with huge jewels, each bone encased in a fine mesh of gold or silver, the skulls adorned with elaborate wigs, fake eyes, painted lips, how could he not have known? That there was, for a few hundred years, a voracious audience for bodies like this, no shame, no secret, until the fashion for bones expired and almost all the relics were stripped of their treasure and destroyed or sold or hidden away. Lost. The books don’t say when P. came to the church in the clearing from his previous home in Switzerland; the last photo of the body was taken there, in an alcove beside the altar of a modest chapel in Wil. Every year, for two hundred years, the body was carried through the streets of his city; thousands got on their knees before him, crying out in joy. A festival. A feast. How many still know this story by heart. A boy on a road in Rome, refusing to lift his sword against a lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.

  * * *

  As soon as his father is in bed Xie is out the door. Lightest wind against his neck. Quick over the mossed log on the stream, through the fence, jump into the soft dirt of the bank and up. Feet snapping through the undergrowth. Full moon. Hands out to feel the trees as he passes, gentle slap against the trunks, fingers slipping over the dark knots in the white wood. Birch eyes. Watching you. Boy in trashed jeans, hood up, a mile in ten minutes. Breathless. Brush of leaves against his face. The light from the church a gem on the slender branches, brighter and brighter, until. There. Deep hush inside. Candles lit, flames straight, white wax piled on the iron shelf beneath the painting of the Virgin, her eyes averted. He takes the key. Open the cabinet. Some sweet scent. All around. Palm to the wood, then to the glass. Warm. Let me look at you. The skull’s cool grin. Nest of gold. Look, then. So quiet. The way it grows around you, this space, the air, time itself, as if you are something. Harmless. Belonging. Here. Cheek against the case, both hands, hips. A burning. Delicious. Rocking against the glass, small tide in your body, building, no one can see you, it is you who are seeing, who can see, how beautiful he is, how right you always were, about this, to want it, the shape of the body the shape of desire itself. Then a sigh, not yours; a caress, gliding up your spine:

  Beloved.

  * * *

  Not a dream. His voice. From above, from below. Xie jerks back, staring. The face in the case the same, the body the same, not moving but something is moving. Inside and out. The sudden heat, the smell of bone, of earth, the stone, the moon against the windows, and P. like all these things; a fact. Xie turns his back on the body, palms to his eyes, panting. Will it hurt you? The air contracts, gathering everything to a single unbearable point, in your head or outside of it, it doesn’t matter. Look at me, beloved. You are not imagining it. It is imagining you. Xie opens his eyes. Whatever you see when you turn will ravish you, destroy you. He turns. As slow as he can. Look. P. waiting. Luminous. Being. Xie shakes so hard his teeth snap down on his tongue, blood at the back of his throat. Whimper bouncing off stone. You could go out, now. Shut up the body, key in the lock, the door closing behind you, why not. Imagine life wandering off in a direction other than the one before you. But you don’t imagine. You get on your knees. Head and hands against the glass. Flesh humming beneath that dark gaze. Close your eyes. Hard swallow. I’m here.

  * * *

  You come every night, all night, one week, two, living only at the edges of every moment spent elsewhere; in the library with Karen, at the meetings with FKK, at the table with your father, even in the woods you are waiting to be with the body. Knees black from kneeling. At the glass falling asleep for seconds at a time, sublime exhaustion, the night an infinite cocoon. The voice doesn’t come again but you sense it, all around. Waiting as you are waiting. The idea takes shape inside you, wordless; you don’t need the voice to tell you what it wants, what it demands. You know how to break a pane of glass. How to hide your face. How much this body weighs: one hundred pounds of metal but only fifteen pounds of bone.

  * * *

  He works in the garden. Tearing out the old dead plants, making plans for raised beds, a cloche system to protect the vegetables in winter; he wants the entire square of earth transformed. He lets his father tell him what to do: weed, haul the dirt, unroll the mesh wire, hammer the nails. Turn the compost. He lays the seeds for broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, chard. Knowing that when they grow he will have to destroy them, in part or in whole, the dilemma of taking life something becoming vegan didn’t solve, that nothing can solve; in the scheme of existence, where does the plant fit? The mink? The trees? Xie? The body? Why does one thing have to take a place above the other, any others? He doesn’t know. Trying to feed himself, his father, in the least ugly way; it seems possible, at this moment, that he can figure out how. A slim string of calm from the bones to you, from you to this. Make something. So that when he comes it is beautiful. You’ve been going out at night, Erik says, dragging a bag of dirt to the fence. Not a question. Yeah. Where to? Just. Shrug. Woods. Doing what? Xie sinks a seed into the earth. Um. Walking. Walking? Yeah, just. Around. Is it safe? Erik asks. Why wouldn’t it be? I don’t know, something might be out there. Xie shakes his head. There’s nothing out there. Well, could you stay in tonight? I’ve got a job in town and I’ll be gone until dinner tomorrow. Xie nods, casual, despite the shiver that runs through him. Sure. They raise the last bed onto its trestle, Xie driving the final nail into the pine. Squinting in the dusk. His father’s hand on his back.

  * * *

  After dinner Xie cleans the attic. On his knees polishing the floor, laying new sheets on the mattress, clearing out old boxes from the closet. Dish of bones at the head of the bed, a branch on the pillow. The garden is ready; the attic is ready. When you hear Erik’s truck disappear down the road you drop silently down the stairs, black mask, black pants, the hammer in your hand.

  * * *

  At the threshold of the church you pause. Face slick beneath the mask. Wait for the fear to kick in but it doesn’t come: no one can hear you, stop you. Robed in the fresh dust of the woods, lungs drunk on its air. Pushing the door open. At last. You recognize the quality of the silence that always fills the church, not absence but expectation, a bubble longing to burst. The cabinet, freshly polished, as smooth as satin in the candlelight. The key gleams on its chain. The doors fall open and the body looks down at you, ravenous. Hand tight on the hammer you tap the glass, one, twice, then again, harder, full swing, and it falls like water, shattering over the stone. Splinters of glass cling to the black mask, in the fibers of which your blood remains, from the last time; you can still taste it. Shaking free of the shards. Hands trembling in the gloves. Climb into the case. Dust and bone and silver. Bracing your back against the wood. Deep breath. Leaning to put your mouth against his teeth, eyes shut tight as you let the kiss run through you. Beloved. Hand aga
inst his cheek. His brittle face. What you have waited for. Then: get the body free, strips of old leather strapping the body to a post. The knife cuts through the skin with a snap. In an instant he falls into you, groan of metal and velvet and bone. The glass cracks beneath your shoes. The body sighs. The crown slips from the skull. You put it on your own head.