Last night I dreamed of the Lady of the Flowers again. I am taller than she. She wears pale blossoms in her hair; they wreath her like the corrupted foam of the modern-day sea; she wears long-stemmed lilies with deep, deathly shadowed cups. The lily stamens are yellow, but a fuzzy, perhaps blood-smeared yellow that runs poisonously into the darkness. This time she is all in white, ruffled white, so that she resembles one of her own drooping lilies.
I look down at her, then sweep my gaze to my hands, holding them up, running the fingers of one carefully over the cuticles of the other, affecting disinterest and coldness, but I can't help letting a nearly soundless sigh flow from me. "You know I'm here," she tells me in a voice that seems to spark and hiss, yet seduces with its high melody. It is a voice with too much in it.
The melodious curves of my own words seem empty now, void and bare of meaning or emotional force. Again, like last time, my voice has become the shadows and dust of the room. "Why have you come?"
I don't know how to challenge the Lady and win. I've tried that day, in the waking world that now seems years or miles away, though I remember that world's importance and feel its effect on my heart even now, in sleep. I've spoken to my friend, my charge – yes, Curt Wild- with my heart, although I usually deem it safer to keep my heart hidden; a certain unguarded openness means pain. I had no luck. The brown eyes were locked, in increasing panic and rage, with hers, as always.
How thin my hands are, the skin drier every day. I wonder if it is the Lady who holds my hands and withers them. They are still beautiful, but then, so is he, sensitive and raw and powerful and radiant beneath the heavy lashes of his eyes. I cannot bear to see him in her arms, in her thrall, bedecked with faded blossoms, bleeding colorless blood and shedding colorless tears.
Blue, is her hypnotic gaze, and for a moment the corner of my eye is caught by the mad spiral of her looking. I face her – I must, I have no choice beneath her petal-soft yet spitfire gaze– but I focus on her messy, violet-red lips. I will never meet her eyes. The Lady of the Flowers knows that; I told her last time, in my silent way.
Now a sun-outpouring window is at her back, leaving the rest of the room to dust and gray shadows, and the light radiates through her, as though she were a piece of paper. Above her nose and below her waist, above and below the edge of the window frame, she is pitch dark. "There's nothing to her," I think.
"The dark and the light shine through," she lectures me. I despise being lectured. It's better to know everything already. I shift my slight weight and note I'm wearing black in the dream.
"So I only let what's there shine through me. I'm not light or dark, though I may be both."
"We're looking at them through your veil now," I chastise her. I may be thinking or speaking; it's the same, here in my mind.
"Ah, ah. All thoughts, all emotions, actions, visions – all dreams, Jack," she tells me firmly (though her voice sounds now exactly like deep wind), "are veils. Veil upon veil. I am sweeter. I dance with veils."
"No. You are a veil. You hide his thoughts and heart from me."
The Lady laughs a ringing-bell laugh, sunlit, almost womanly. "You have to see me from the other side!" And she stands like a fair virgin in the sun-spilling window. There is even a sweet blue sky behind her.
The dusty, carpeted room where I stand, breathing slowly, is dim and unlit. I turn my face away from her, blinking my eyes gently; they are mildly dazzled. I shun her, but my absence will not make her leave him, or make him leave her. There is no making in this world, only consent given. God did not make the heavens and the earth; he asked their consent, and they were willing to exist.
And she licks her lips in a silly, human gesture. I don't like it when she becomes more real, almost a person. "I will never see you from the other side," I inform her, not unkindly.
Her voice is choked and fast, the light is snapped off – the window is gone and the room is completely black. "Why won't you love me?" she shrieks in the blankness, "oh, Jack, you have to live for me and love me! No? Never? There is no never, Jack, only the imaginary particle called the moment. That particle is gold and worth everything, because nothing else exists. Live for that. Live for me." I have no response. She is a moment and a lost life.
Fast and fierce her soft bosom presses to me, her thin arms thrown around my shoulders, the sleek-stroking hands seeking return caresses. The stamens and tubes and rough stems of the frail, ill, lilies touch me too. I do not flinch at the waxy lily-cups that press to my skin bruisingly, though I shudder, very slightly, like a cat that brushes against a dewdrop, when maniacally scented pollen is rubbed across my cheek; the whiff makes my head ache and my feet stumble in faintness.
"I dance for a reward," she gasps, hot-breathed, in the thick darkness.
"His mind, I know. His body, his sanity, his tears. You are greedy – you take everything he has, except me." And he barely has me, I reflect internally.
The Lady hears. "He has you, he has you firmly tied with – love."
"Why do you say that? I love him, yes, I do. That cannot come to much." I close my lips tightly. I always speak too much in dreams, as though I prefer the audience of my own mind.
"No," murmurs the pollen-rough voice, "that's my reward."
This perplexes me into speech. "His love? My loss?"
"Neither."
"Then, Lady," I exclaim in my imperial and demanding tone, "what reward do you expect, when you dance with your veils before him?"
"Your head."
"Mine?"
"You don't come to me, but I can reach out – and touch you. I am proving it."
"You touch me because you touch Curt. You prove your own power of destruction? My suffering or his doesn't… validate your actions, or your existence, Lady."
It unnerves her when I remain calm under her caresses, I realize; she pulls away and the light begins to silver the room again. Her ruffle-clad form seems dark and distorted, and she says nothing. We wait.
"I'm going to wake up now," I say.
"You can't. Not until I've shown you one last thing."
I know what it is. After a freezing for a moment, I lower my lashes in imperceptible consent. The Lady of the Flowers turns, in a straight-backed, footless-seeming turn, and lifts one white arm, trailing slightly grayed veils, up in a gesture at once ancient and balletic. The dance she begins is as hypnotic as her gaze, but she seems to consist mostly of smoke trails and skirts and the eternal, drooping flowers. When I realize this is because she is dancing for an audience on the opposite side of the room, I slip discreetly around the walls until I can see his face, between the flashing veils.
Curt stands in his spring-loaded manner, at once relaxed and gripped with tension. Or rather, this is how everyone stands, but the tension and relaxation form a different pattern in every body… Curt's is the pattern I am most drawn to. Sea-blue is still a true term and for me, no cliché, because it describes his eyes – which I have looked into many and many a time, as one might look into a well, praying for water. They are so often dry. I know who drinks those eyes dry –leaves them red-glazed or tearless and hard.
He seems so awake now, to her. Those eyes are awake with dawning sensation, one hand cups the stirred air of her dancing as though reaching out to her, and now he seizes one of her flying veils as though he would tumble her to the musty carpet. Laughing mouth wide, he lets the Lady spin and swirl him, draping him in her rags and petals. A flower in her hair is caressed and licked by his pink tongue, which is at once streaked with gold pollen.
As I did, he staggers with the scent and taste of sick lilies, but he continues to dance – now more slowly – round and round, a still-graceful, stumping dance. Then the Lady of the Flowers lays him down. His firm, gray-ocean eyes slide to look on me for a moment as the curtains of her outfit fall around him and he lies back upon her knees. Those lips are still awake and conscious, as they so rarely are in life – he only says, "Oh, were you there? Sorry, Jack. I'll miss you. Goodbye."
Then he sleeps, soundly, like – yes, like a child, the infantile creature he is. The weak, pale stems of lilies lie across his face. She looks at him, upon her floating, cloudy robes, without expression now, her gaze hypnotic; beneath her half-lowered eyelids I catch the mind-fixing glint of blue. "And my reward?" she asks him with no sound.
Curt breathes a long, shuffling breath in his sleep. His life must be in that breath, I think; he does not breathe after that. A large facet of my heart fractures with a pure and high-pitched noise, above the Lady's range of hearing. I trail a frail, still-young hand across my chest and make no other sign. Curt lies so very still.
The Lady of the Flowers beckons me, and I kneel down beside them, unresisting now, and she claims her reward. Her hands tremble, or pulse, as she places them surely and firmly on my treasured high cheek-bones, and lifts my face to her hypnotic eyes. Into their swirls, dangerous fraught with untrue meaning, I gaze unwinking. They are an electric blue more ancient and strong than electricity. The poison-violet lips are pressed to mine in warm and swollen reception. I taste the thousand flavors of addiction, and fall inexplicably through them to an infinite network of stars, thence into the void we call home.
Air like liquid is breathed in through my cold lips as I awaken to the late morning in the sculpture we call reality. Dreams, I suppose, are the cinema, thoughts the music – which makes me once again the musician. Then, why is not everyone a musician? My metaphor cannot bear the weight of everyone on this life raft we call Earth, England… What country am I in?
Berlin, and I sit up.