The Warm South

Prologue in Hell

Prologue in Hell

He died; but they turned the lock on his bones and shut the ghost inside. Everything had to go on as before. He discovered the persistence of walls, the dominion of furniture. Look long enough into the ceiling and the ceiling ends up inside you.

I have not begun the last work, that of losing things.

They fed him on milk and toast. They bled him from the neck, and they took away the cork-stoppered bottle of laudanum that he had been saving in his travel chest, under the Paradise Lost. Think of your soul! they said. He wept. That bottle, which he had never uncorked, had been his last comfort. The pain cannot get worse. The pain did get worse, every time, and the consolations of his soul went up in bonfires, except for the knowledge that he might kill it. He would swallow from the bottle only once and endure five seconds more. The five seconds stretched forward their fibers, became an hour, and his senses were cut away.

I will tell you what is the life you have saved… the cough and hemorrhage you know. The night sweats are to come. The palpitations. The wasting diarrhea, that empties the structure. You are tending a corpse….

He couldn’t draw breath. His throat scorched. An ocean hung at his lips and he could not drink for weakness. He started awake at night with his sheets drenched and his heart skipping in him like something tumbling over ice. Instead of the old scarlet spittle he now brought up a black vomit into the chamberpot, threaded with clots. Yet he always had enough blood to fill the leeches in the morning. How, then, could anyone believe in his death?

The pain prowled him from side to side and scratched for its exit. He knew it as he had known faces. His skin had begun to sag at the joints, with a waxy cast as if ready to peel away.

He could not play this game forever, always extending the same five seconds.

Say farewell.

His ambitions were forgotten. Friendship and love were fond, faraway dreams. Lay them into bed, let them drowse. His secrets were harder to let go, being his alone. That evening field of wheat, dipping its stalks in the wind—will it not survive me? No. Nor the very near things. The wall, the slant of yellow sun. Unwind them from your heart. This sheet and blanket are the span of your being. You lie still as a saint. Do not cling to breath, neither shrink from pain. The world spins outside your door, and from now on will have to answer its own questions. For you there is drowsing and letting go.

He dreamed his death. A physician’s scalpel slit him from sternum to navel. A violet track, the mark of poison, touched his innards.

Was I betrayed?

Someone laughed. You may go to law.

Kindling was heaped under his pallet and set alight. Everything he had touched in life must be burned.

Deep in the earth, where the dead had their courtroom, up and down were turned about. Benches hung in rows above his head and he clambered down an arched ceiling into the well of a dome. A crowd was gathered around a magistrate, and he shoved between their shoulders, calling, who is not dead, let him live! In fact he was saying, I alone am living, let me die, since in the courtroom of the dead every word had its meaning turned about. The pages in his hand were out of order. He could not read a single line from beginning to end, and everything was mixed in with his poems and plays, not his finished work but the abandoned things he had never brought to print. He tried to hide them against his breast, but a bailiff in riding clothes leaned from behind and said, ah, Cockney poetry, the rare wild weed.

On the far side of the crowd there showed a woman’s white hand, a color cool as water. To touch it would end him. He tried to reach around the bailiff, but the man’s shoulders kept moving to block his way.

Thou, spoke the magistrate. Unsay thy farewells.

Sir?

Thou shalt take up each thread at the place it was dropped. Ravel them back into the whole.

The key turned in the lock. The bone cage cracked open. He was flung upward, tumbling fast as if rising from the bottom of the ocean. The blue arm of night flowed up his limbs, kissed his temples, and a trickle of snow touched his throat. He lifted his chest to suck and a torrent of ice poured into him. He was penetrated to the fingertips and could not be filled. What was this power?

He was drowned; he was alive. With all his heart he had expected to be finished.