There is a desert in your blonde-white hair
With lions sleeping in the sun.
Your eyes are wide and deadly pools
That draw me under blue.
Pretty bone-teeth glisten savagely
Veiled by the currents of salt-red blood, your lips.
You watch me always, hungry;
Your smile is a tomb-sweet lure,
and on and on, more gruesomely. He felt ashamed; he longed to destroy the book; it was horrible to him. But he had kept it so long, even if without looking at it.
It made him sick.
Now through the night-whipped trees I passed with silent tread, creeping through lakes of moldering leaves, filling myself with unspeakable etheric fires, whatever those might have been. The grave awaited me, just as it now truly did, when he went to visit the true Victoria, who was truly dead but not hungry for him and whose smile was no lure to anything horrid, or was it? The grave awaited me. The sweet-smelling soil about it was repulsively soft, and I tunneled through it with loathsome ease, no doubt because that summer he had been reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Through the soil, a green-white hand, blotched and cold, came groping in search of me.
Now he remembered that for years he had suffered from nightmares of this sort, nearly every night. He must have been very ill. — Why hadn’t he killed himself? — Women had saved him, one after the other. — Hadn’t he hoped that Victoria would do the same? — She could have said: I’m waiting for you, and here’s my hand; my hand’s alive, and my smile’s alive and I love you. — But who could have loved something like him? Eagerly I scraped the earth aside…
Flushing, he closed up the hateful book again and reinterred it in the envelope. He could bear no more of it today.
He chewed his pain pills. Then he lay down and waited for the syrupy narcosis to comfort him. He dreaded to meet Victoria’s eyes.
He felt better. There was the envelope, lying on his father’s desk. He longed to put it away in the drawer. Rising, he picked it up — and the red book broke through the brittle yellow edge. — Shame, shame, as pitiless as sunlit revelations of grime in spiderwebs!
Coasting over the lunar surface at a very low altitude seemed to improve his spirits, so he now did that nearly every afternoon, especially when it was too hot and bright to visit the cemetery: browsing across the moon map as if he were peering through leaf-holes into the light, loving the white shinings on the black and silver moon, searching for a certain unknown thing in craters on the night side of the terminator, while weary old Earth arose as jewel-green as a new oak gall. Whatever else was written in that red book of poems might if he were sufficiently fortunate be equally valuable. Consider the eighteen-year-old patient of Jung’s who, having been preyed upon by her brother and a schoolmate, discovered that sorrow is a labyrinth of translucent glass, whose passageways gain in weariness and bewilderment by half-showing the adjacent ones, which may be their own turnings, and which continue even deeper into that green dimness of sea-glass; until she began to believe herself to live upon the moon, where all women and children had to be sequestered underground, in icy fissures in the grey moon-bone, in order to protect them from a certain vampire. Volunteering to kill this monster, she caused herself to be placed on a high tower in the middle of Lacus Mortis (45˚ N 27˚ E); and they gave her a knife before departing with protestations of admiring grief. Thus far in this tale, although it has been wisely called the last receiver, being the entity which communicates all rays and causes from the superiors to the inferiors, the moon seems no very pleasant place. But even before the dark predator came winging over the half-lit lunar canyons, she must have been lubricated by what prudes call curiosity; for she kept begging herself: Let me just find out what he looks like beneath his lush-feathered wings. Afterward I’ll stab him. — Muffling his face in his black shoulders, contracting into his own long spine, like a folding umbrella, the vampire now settled silently onto the parapet, close enough for her to touch his elbow had she wished to. With extreme caution and delicacy, like a fisherman setting up his lures, he reopened his wings. His features attracted her far more than she could have imagined. Drinking in the sight of his beautiful eyes, she hesitated a trifle too long, so that he seized her and bore her off, through the dark grooves and into a pretense of brightness: green and orange swales, the roar of water dulling down the piping screams of death. What happened between them next Jung never reports, but I think it fair to suppose that there was kissing, sucking and tickling involved, for she soon considered the moon so lovely a place that she struggled against being cured and was thereby condemned to dwell on earth. What if the skinny, shy seventeen-year-old boy who loved Victoria had been of the moon-woman’s type? In other words, what if he could have dug down through the cemetery loam and liked it? In his spirit he dreamed over his moon map. It also soothed him to sit at his father’s desk and gaze at Victoria’s letters, even without reading them; today he wasn’t well enough for that. From the middle of the heap he withdrew a new one and placed it in an old pouch that he had, in the expectation of carrying it with him around his neck for several weeks, his joy in it slowly swelling — not at all the desperate joy which had inflamed him like longing when he was seventeen and she calmly slipped another note into his hand in the high school corridor, then rushed off to her chemistry class, or when a new letter lay in a slim white envelope in his family’s mailbox, bearing a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp or that butterfly or an American eagle gripping sheaves and arrows in its claws — and always her sweet name or initials greeted him on the return address, which she very occasionally typed but mostly wrote in her very slightly forward-slanting script: a new treasure to add to his hoard; ever so carefully he slit open the lefthand edge of the envelope. How his heart used to pound at seventeen! The pleasure he felt nowadays was a fiery, peaty spirit which had aged in an oak cask until its sting had grown capable of clothing itself with knowing discretion within sweet smoothness. Who could say which was better? Good boy, he drank whichever was available. Sometimes his loving pleasure in Victoria brought water to his tired old eyes.
It was a hot and utterly silent day. Smiling, he took the envelope in his fingers as gently as he could and kissed it. Just as some Saxons used to place a coin in a corpse’s mouth, to keep it content with gnawing on that, so he clutched this letter of hers, and withheld other aspirations; but then the aspirations came anyway. Desire rose up gently within him, and he gave himself over, pulling the letter out of the envelope with much the same smoothness which had once informed his unhooking of women’s brassieres (although in Victoria’s case, his first, he had made several attempts, too flustered and ignorant to understand how the hooks went, until she finally undid them for him; and he kissed her delicious armpits). Now the letter lay undressed but still folded in his hands. He coaxed the folds apart. She loved him; she loved him; now she would say she loved him.