Excerpt from Song of Solomon (Book 2 of Wildspace)
…go…
Solomon left in the night, fearing he would be unable if he had to say goodbye. He wrote his mother a note, and walked out the door with CJ, the dog. He walked slow, through the woods, playing fetch. The dog chased the sticks which he rarely did anymore. Normally, he just looked at them and leaned against Solomon’s legs, or laid down and slept.
He sat by the river; CJ lay down, head upon his lap. He reached into his pack, felt a book that he had not known was there. He had not brought a book. He pulled it out, a leather journal. Letters were burned into the cover.
The Song of Solomon.
Inside the cover, he recognized his mother’s perfect cursive.
Solomon, my beautiful son,
I celebrate your journey into the world; your parting brings me sadness at the same time. As a mother, I must worry. Perhaps it has no meaning, but I have seen so much of darkness and pain in my life. So much loss.
Now I lose you, though I know you must go. You can never return, as you know already. I must say it, though, so that no slight evasion will mar what we shared.
Be careful. Outside of our wonderful world, peace is not the rule. Openness and our special freedom cannot be found in the plentiful abundance to which you are accustomed. Being who you are, strange forces will seek you.
A line of wildsong comes to mind.
‘Your pain in its depth is your joy in its life.’
We will not meet again. Watching you grow and knowing that this day would come has been Wildcard’s most cruel blessing. Or perhaps it is just the way of existence, that children must leave home.
I love you so much, and ever remain,
your mother
“I love you, too, mom.” His eyes were moist. “I miss you already.”
An excellent pen, the case made of blue stone with rims of silver at the joint of the cap and the body, was clipped inside the binding, which seemed rounded for the pen itself. He felt the fine leather and the heavy pages, smelled the book. It smelled of the center, the home he was leaving forever. It smelled classic, and good, and true. His mother had spoken of cheaply made things, mass-produced was the word, which were all the same. She had referred to them with a mild repugnance.
“You will not find them here,” she said. “In the center, each thing is unique.”
It was true. Each cup, each floor tile, each board in the porch, was different. Solomon looked for a repeat after she said it, through the trees, in the meadow with the stump, among the insects. He never found it.
He and CJ arrived at the stream. He sat on a rock beside the bridge, looking at it. The gate. So small a thing to hold back a universe.
“CJ, the wolf of the center,” he said. “I wish you could come with me. Maybe I’ll see you out there, pup.”
He rubbed the sides of their faces together.
“How long will you live?”
He had not written much, but felt an urge to now. He held the pen, fitted the cap on the bottom with a satisfying snugness. The blank page intimidated in this finely crafted book. He did not want to mar it with some trivial thing. He had only his anguish at leaving home and his excitement. These fleeting emotions, though intense, might not be worthy of the first entry in his lovely book.
He laughed at his hesitation and wrote.
…go…
sorrow was not his name,
as he strove in the brilliant sun,
against a foe beyond all definition,
bearing hard upon him
It’s intuition complete, it wandered away.
Who could say what truly happened,
as we trick ourselves time and again
as before we always have as well
?but must we always
like Kings in the Bible
trick ourselves, time and again
laying upon a blanket of false kindness
whispering funny lies in the night
to no one
to whomever we are with
do not send yourself
slipping from the center
unbravely and alone into the world
but, claiming courage
as you were born to do
go…
He reread the poem, put the book in his pack, pulled it tight, and threw a stick for CJ. He didn’t chase it this time. He just looked at Solomon with those mournful dog eyes.
“See you later, boy.” He knelt and hugged him, then turned and crossed the bridge leading out of the center.
The Poet walked out on her deck. She thought of herself as Virginia at times, as Karl had named her, years before. She remembered it, the delirium of waking after the box opened. RJ Sublime, the Gambler, had been kneeling over her, trying to stop her bleeding from the hole where her child had been torn. He saved her life, somehow. He had buried LuvRay’s body, cleaned up the mess, and stayed with her for a few weeks. He did not speak of what he saw, and she never asked. She felt the horror of it as a ghost in that room, and didn’t want to know. Knowing what had happened to her infant would be worse than not knowing.
She thought of Karl, fingered the scar on her belly, faded from sailing in the sun. She was an old woman now. The years before Karl came, before the box, had not been measured. Time had not been meaningful to the Poet until loss hung itself on her door. The people in the nearby town, so nameless and distant, became more real. She came to care for them, the grocer, the fisherman, the teacher. It was a stock village, clearly there for her benefit. Icons, she understood, flat beings existing only to give context to her world. They were there only for her to have a life, to bring her food and relate to her, each in their own way. They seemed almost to disappear when she was not around, or to perform a few simple functions over and over.
That changed after the box. The icons became more real, infected with the tragedy of what passed. They knew something terrible had happened, knew the baby had disappeared, and never asked her. That night created the world she now lived in. It turned the inhabitants from a simple, but boring cheerfulness, into the somber and slightly deranged group it was now. They had become real people. The world had ceased to be hers, and she was happy about that. She had never known how unusual it was to live in a world that turned upon her being, but its absence lifted that strange burden, a fact which took her as long to notice as it took to happen.
She had become more real as well. She had been little more than an icon herself, when Karl came and they fell in love. His presence, his child, and the box had matured her. She was no longer just a doorway for Wildcard’s voice; she now had her own voice. Having never faced the events of that night, she harbored the shame of believing herself to be a coward. Odd, and perhaps wrong, that it took that kind of suffering and mental scarring to make her a real human being. Would she have been a good mother?
She had aged quickly, growing old in a few short years. She looked at her wrinkled hands and chuckled. How many more poems did they have left? The number was not infinite. Death was coming, making its presence felt in a personal way. Before, in the poems, it had always been an abstraction.
She was on her boat, sailing, before she knew what she was doing. A short one, she lied, as the thin lip of land and home slipped away behind. She lost herself in sad thoughts of Karl and her missing child, wondering what her life had meant. She put her cheek against chill of the brass railing and looked behind the boat, at the fading wedge running after. She wanted to tell its story, saw in each tiny chudding roll of the wake a metaphor of the individual rising from the oceanic sameness.
Soon, she could feel the taking, her mind turning towards as Wildcard claimed her for his purpose. Tears came, just a moistness, as she touched the edge of the ecstasy that had been absent for so long. She clutched the railing, seeing her fate, and happy for it.
“I am ready,” she said. “Take me.”
The wind was brilliant and the sky blew its blueness at her in the needed rhythm, in the why of naked existence. Setting the sail to spend itself straight out over the light chop of the sea, she went below decks to write, as she had not done in far too long. The knife edge of the pen burned as it joined with her hunger, the pages crying for her again, as once they did, and far more often. She wrote the pain of the box, of her world, of her lost love and child, Karl, and the nameless and numberless beings scattered and found by Wildcard’s hand whose suffering and lost stories were limited by no imagination and whose simple clever wonder always stole her eye away from herself. She belonged to this many, and her shame had made her forget, but now she remembered. All of her days and the fiery longing she had allowed to be twisted in the aftermath of that night brought itself to the flowing ink.
She lost herself, in the embrace of the blank page, as it filled itself again and again with their beautiful song of union. A timeless zone, like a snow-globe, settled upon the cabin, and she lost track of light and dark as they hovered like moths around.
A storm rose, strange and hypnotic, the mirror of her writing. She wrote the abstract epic of the storm, saw the symbol pitching the boat which would write her death as she let it blow with no thought of leaving the table. What she now wrote could never be read, and must be written. The boat blew, scudding and rocking, tipping in the wind, but never quite tipping over. She was knocked about, eventually managed to halt her pen long enough to strap herself into the chair which was lagged to the floor.
Sensing the beauty the words would have brought to people in despair, she choked on the sadness of knowing that her final offering, written in the helpless vision of seeing all the realms of beings laid out before her like a seed in the palm, would never be known. Her greatest work would die with her, as it was born, echoing the fate of the child she had never met.
A rush of images rose and fell, stories written in the brilliant heartbreak of a single word, all true. As they ran, she captured what she could, ceased looking at the paper, writing by feel and memory of how the hand should move, but watching and living the display of unique histories, more than she could number or ever write. She became a door for Wildcard, collapsing into the mystic syllable of being his voice again, of no hindrance to perfect perception, and let the tears of the unbearable epiphany write the saga more than the ink itself.
Pictures of suffering and joy, stories, love, sacrifice and dark heroics, she wrote it all, going too fast to know what she was putting down. It may have lasted for days or minutes, she had no notion and no thought of it. Finally the boat capsized, tossing her against the table, breaking ribs. The ancient scar reopened and she bled. The pen was lost.
She fought her way up, and standing on the ceiling of the cabin, holding pages on the bottom of the table, clutching one of its legs, desperate with the fullness, she took paper and wrote with her own blood. It was slow, impossible, but she had no choice. She was furious with the greed of putting the words down so that they could sink away forever from the mind of man.
She wrote one more of the hundred million lines she had yet to pen in the unreal vision of watching her blood float out from the submerged page as she struggled to tell the story of Wildcard’s children. “You are born,” she wrote, “into the death of the story.”
Virginia was five. She never met her mother, who had died during childbirth, from a mistake the Doctor made while giving a caesarean section. She lived with her father in a large and elegant two story home with a white picket fence. She learned to read at the startling age of 2 and a half, and could read well now. She could use a dictionary. Her father had taught her.
One day, she was playing in her father’s study, filled with books. So many books. They were old and leather and fine. She had seen a few other books, not like these, but bound with paper. Paperbacks were not allowed here. These were books of quality. That’s what her dad said. Sometimes he read to her; there were some children’s books. Today, she was in there by herself, playing. She ran her hands along the spines of the books, enjoying the fine smell.
One of the books shocked her.
“Owie.” Static electricity, it was called. “My finger.”
She looked at the spine of the book. It was blank leather. She pulled it off the shelf and looked at the cover. The Song of Solomon. She opened it.
The Sorcerer’s Code
Why does this being,
powerful and ablaze in all the universe,
live for but an instant?
Why does it feel naked and afraid?
There was no battle; all war is illusion, there is no death; all death is a dream,
The play of things does not occur
Look for our power, aching with dark magic,
look for our undying, filled with breaking light,
our protection is not for you alone, we would heal all if it were in our sway
we care for that which needs it, and when we must, we destroy
stand with us, at your death’s hour
at the lip of the universe
come, upon the now
tell me your name
?are you a child that darkens our door
She didn’t know the meaning, but she liked the words. Virginia laid the book on the desk and went to get her dad.
“Daddy, come look at the book I found on the shelf.”
He was busy, but after a bit he came with her. It was not on the desk anymore. She looked on the shelf where it should be, but it was not there either.
“Virginia, sweetie, Daddy doesn’t have time for these games. I’m busy right now. Go play with something else, OK?”
But she didn’t want to play with something else. She wanted to find The Song of Solomon.