In real life, as distinct from uncoiled memory, McCabe was as alive and human as Mrs. Crandall, even if I perceived no carnality in her. Was flesh necessary for life? Thunder, lightning, wind, music, and, come to think of it, birds did not bring flesh to mind, and yet they were alive. McCabe was the most splendid specimen of the breed. I knew that life and passion existed outside the flesh. I had seen it in McCabe and experienced it with her, but I did not understand it. My brain was too small to grasp this in any but the most general way. Whenever I tried to understand McCabe and her effect on me, I would feel the vertigo of the starry sky. Just as on the Night of the Dead at Shangri-La’s cemetery, when praying to heaven with my grandmother for her indito godchildren’s forebears. Abandon yourself. Do not think. Who said that? I could not identify the voice. The zone of clarity has lousy acoustics. Bincrósbi, for all we knew, could have been a sadistic pedophile, the kind who shoots videos of six-year-old girls sticking pencils into their tight little assholes. Saint Bincrósbi, Protector of the Spics. He had the narrow, sharp features that McCabe’s body was made for, but mercifully did not get. Things would not be what they are if McCabe had Bincrósbi’s mug. This curious thought finally woke me up.
The house was mute. A robin sat on the rosebush. Don’t they migrate? McCabe would have known. I missed her. Unbearably. Odiously. Just one more day of suffering. I may have held her soul in my mouth, whatever that meant, but it did not stop my longing. It made it worse. My appetite for her was as insatiable as Mrs. Crandall’s had been for me until the day she imposed her will on herself and dismissed me. Exemplary Mrs. Crandall. I was tempted to go to her, drown in her overflowing and uncomplicated breasts, but I pulled back on my leash as she had on hers. Mrs. Crandall and I understood each other perfectly well. We were dogs in heat—prairie dogs, not the horrific kennel-dwellers. Two cowardly, but free, prairie dogs.
With the logs split by McCabe, I had built a pyramidal pyre inside the icehouse. After stuffing the pyramid with fire starters, and placing a large gas can in a corner, I had removed two stones from the upper part of the icehouse wall so that the smoke could escape. Oxygen to keep the fire alive would come in through the heavy iron door, which I would keep open as much as necessary. The stone could resist a temperature of about twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit without cracking. I would lay McCabe’s naked body on top of the pyramid face up, arms open, eyes closed.
I had seen her naked body twice before. The first time was from my window on a balmy October morning, after the snow that had frozen my feet had melted. She had been splitting logs for about an hour by the gardening shed when she took off her clothes and work boots and doused herself with the hose. The water must have been cold, but she did not seem to mind. She coiled the hose on a low sycamore branch and stood underneath, face upturned, drinking the water and letting it run down her chest and belly. I could not see her face. From my window, she looked about six inches high by the distant shed. I hesitated before I picked up the Judge’s binoculars. I was afraid to disturb the flow of events. That was one of my phobias. Curiosity was stronger. Like a doomed time traveler in a Saturday morning show, I trained the binoculars on her face. Her lips were parted to receive the water, the tip of her tongue visible inside her mouth, waiting, her eyes closed in the heavy-lidded way of someone sleeping. Her face was transfigured. She was so human that she was inhuman. I dropped the binoculars as if I had stepped barefoot on burning coals. The second time was at night. My own moaning woke me from the fever long enough to catch a glimpse of her standing naked at the foot of my bed, then walking to the window to close the shades. Oh, merciful one, who rushes in the dead of night to the sickbed of the worm without thinking of covering yourself! I had seen her naked twice, yet I still had not seen her flesh. The fire would.
McCabe’s pubic hair was a deep red. I had not trained the binoculars on her body. That would have been indecent. I had seen the red splotch with my own eyes on the distant six-inch figure, right before water began to pour out of the hose, darkening and flattening the hair on her head and body. The hair on her head was almost black, like her eyelashes and the hair of her armpits. Her tee shirt sleeve receded to reveal the dark armpit hair when she lifted her right arm above her head to get me a book from the Judge’s uppermost shelf. I was next to her and happened to look up from my wheelchair at that very instant, catching the dark underarm shadow. Behind the book I had asked for, whose title I don’t remember, she found a 1904 edition of Audubon’s Birds of America. During our last meal together, she told me that finding that book, on that precise day, had been a good omen. Of what, she wouldn’t say. Perhaps as a consolation, she volunteered that she had grown up watching birds in Maine, which in the summer was the bird capital of the world. More than two thousand different species had been sighted. The cliffs near Portland were a favorite nesting spot for albatross. McCabe almost convinced me she was from Maine. What does it matter now?
McCabe took the Audubon book to her room the night she found it. She must have taken it with her when she left, along with what I always assumed was her birding notebook. Now everything is subject to reinterpretation. The Audubon book, as all other items in the Judge’s house, was in an inventory attached to the lease that McCabe had signed. Early on, before her transformation, old McCabe had given me the lease to keep along with ten thousand dollars in twenties and tens for household expenses. I had insisted on a cash economy. “Ain’t no more where dat come from, so make it last,” she jabbered in her phony Afro-Brooklynese. The time when I was devoted to covering my tracks, with alibis, with taking my revenge on that bombastic but ultimately harmless creature also named McCabe, seems so remote now that I wonder if my brain is finally going dark under this mattress, or if the remoteness is of a moral nature, an acknowledgement of my insignificance. I am not today who I was at the end, and I was not then who I was at the beginning, or even in the middle. This is not a riddle, dear listener, but a statement of fact.
In the silence after Bincrósbi’s posthumous white dream, I wondered what the Judge’s heirs would think happened to the Audubon book. I could ask McCabe when I saw her. I sat in bed, sobered by this unappetizing possibility. My curiosity was beginning to flicker already. I was, until then, the most curious person I had ever known. It was my pride, my sole accomplishment, the only respectable entry in my private Guinness Book of World Records, chock full of petty excesses. That Christmas morning, however, I did not want to learn anything more about McCabe. I knew little, or nothing, but it was enough. I would not ask her about the Audubon book and her notebook, or where she had been, why she had left, why she had come back (although this was not a mystery: she would come back because, unlike me, she was still curious—she who had no flesh, she of the eternal mercy, she of the impassible face which was the face of kindness because hatred is never impassible—she, unlike me, was still in the world). It was a sublime contradiction, that of mercy and power, whose deciphering would have delighted me not long ago, but now left me indifferent. A lifetime of curiosity was over. The time of acceptance and action had begun, a twenty-four-hour cycle that would end the next morning at this hour with a pyramid of smoldering ashes. Did anyone know the precise hour of Mary’s accouchement? We should drink a toast to her, McCabe and I.