They began to play on him, using tiny wooden hammers, as though they knew there were hidden harmonies in his body and sought only to release them. At first, he liked the sensation of being played. He heard the tune his ribs made and sang along with it. It was as familiar to him as the faces of the players, though as with them he couldn’t locate the memory. Only gradually did it dawn on him that they were playing the tune backwards and that it was hurting him.
The hurt had laughter in it initially. It was like tickling. And it was like desire too. When the hammers found the inside of his thighs he called out to them to stop but in reality wanted them to strike him with more precision, there and there and there, and to beat out a rhythm more concordant with his own. Then he saw that what he wanted had nothing at all to do with it, that the orchestra was playing for itself. There was no longer pleasure in the pain. His skin began to blister and fall away. Underneath, his flesh was brown and crusted, like burnt meat. Elegantly, dexterously, always in time with one another, the monkey-men hammered it from the bone.
He realised that his skeleton had all along been their objective. In order truly to make music they had to have unimpeded access to his vertebrae, to his sternum, to the phalanges of his toes and fingers, to every minute ossicle hidden behind his hearing and his sight. Only now, stripped of whatever might muffle sound or impair precision, had he become the perfect instrument.
Alert in every faculty, sentient in every bone, my father watched his companions raise their hammers for their cadenza. Victim of the most terrible desolation, a sadness that was the greater for its unsurprisingness, he listened to himself being beaten back into powder.
Then there was Lilith. The night-hag. My father’s first wife.
In his waking hours he was not aware that there had been anyone before my mother, but when he slept he called grievously for his first love, begging her to return to him, promising that he was sorry, that he had changed, that in respect to every one of her complaints he would be the husband in the future he had failed to be in the past.
She had left him in displeasure at the manner of their intercourse. He had lacked sensitivity and politeness. Was without feeling for the etiquette of conjugality. Although they had been created equally, at the same time, Satanael vomiting uncleanness into their mouths simultaneously, my father had insisted on precedence, demanding that she cook and otherwise attend to him, and assume the inferior position during congress. This last compliance, he argued, was owing to him because of the sharp verrucose scales that covered her body. If he wasn’t to be pierced in a thousand places, or otherwise fouled and nauseated, it had to fall to him to choose the time and the method of approaching her.
They had also fallen out over theology. Their souls, he maintained, were composed of millions of particles of light, stolen from the original Realm of Light and imprisoned in their bodies by the Demons of Darkness. Eventually these particles would be gathered back to their natural source and they, Adam and Lilith — Lilith and Adam, if that was how she preferred it — would no longer feel strangers in creation.
Gibberish, was her opinion of this theory. Their souls were nothing other than toads and worms, put there by Satan, who was good, to remind them that life itself was the invention of God, who was bad. She would ask him to remember this when he satisfied his lust for debauchery upon her with his serpent’s tail, and initiated a seminal process that was bound to end unhappily. Do not expect me, she warned him, to look kindly on any infants born to us in perpetuation of this evil.
It was not a marriage made in heaven. Even before she left him he was searching his desires for alternatives, and practising how to ask God for Eve. A smooth skin, was his first stipulation. A gentle disposition. Calm eyes. A strong maternal instinct.
But now, in his dreams, he was missing the abrasion of Lilith’s badness. Her fiery stare. Her stables-stench. The nettle-sting of her embraces, which a man might simulate only by taking the head of a wart-hog or an enormous pineapple into his arms.
He cried out for her. Lilith! Lilith! But she was out on the night with the vultures and the screech owls, hunting for newborn babies — the abode of toads and worms — to strangle and devour.
He fared no better with his twin.
You could say, because there was no name, because the first and last of his nightmare was a hopeless search to find the name, that he fared worse.
Hence his grief. He was one half of a whole, he had once shared a completeness, complemented a reflection, but he could not remember with whom.
He had loved someone dearly but he could not quite — no, he could not at all — recall the face. He could recall only the last recollection of a recollection. And that was featureless.
He could not hear the voice either. Or make out the shape. Or guess the sex. Or be certain of the species.
He was beholden, he acknowledged debt, he rejoiced in obligation and fantasies of requital, but his gratitude hung disregarded in the black waters of his memory, like an unbaited hook.
He went wandering high and low, hoping for a trace, an intimation in some passing countenance. But no one passed. Not a single person.
He began to search the faces of animals. Horses, pigs, jackals, cattle, ostriches, bears. Except for the ostriches, who took his curiosity to be an impertinence and ran from him in rage, all the animals were good about it, showing him their profiles, right and left, and letting him peer long into their molten eyes until he was satisfied they were not who he was looking for. The bears were especially sympathetic, and laid saddened paws on his shoulders, as though they had gone twin-hunting themselves in earlier days and understood its anguish.
But it was with cats that he came nearest. In them he saw a misincarceration as tragic as his own, a confused isolation, a companionlessness that stretched every second between eating and sleeping into a futile eternity. If ever a creature was an incomplete half of an idea, a cat was. He tried to engage them in conversation on this topic but they professed not to know what he was talking about. If ever a creature was sufficient to itself, they told him, a cat was. He told them, in his turn, that they were bound to say that. They reminded him that he was the one who had stopped to talk. He said it wasn’t his intention to challenge, only to condole with them. They thanked him but wished him to be assured that they didn’t need his condolences. He thanked them but explained that he badly needed theirs. They said they were not in the business of commiseration. He offered it as his opinion, though they might take it or leave it, that that was because their alienation from the other half of themselves had led to a hardening of their hearts. They said they would leave it. He said they had chosen badly. They asked who he thought he was to know what was best for them. He asked who they thought they were to know what was best for themselves, when half of themselves was missing. Thereafter it always ended with his getting scratched.
On these nights the cries that were torn from his chest were not so terrible as when the monkey-men had him, or Lilith was out on the wind. They were more like yelps or whinnies, the sounds of merely routine animal excruciation. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t torment in the dream and bitterness in the aftermath; it simply meant that it was the missing twin who suffered it.