Helpmeet

by Naben Ruthnum

Does not all the blood within me Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee, As the springs to meet the sunshine, In the Moon when nights are brightest? HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

“We’ll go if you wish. But can you manage the trip?” “I couldn’t without you, but I’m not without you. We can manage it. But it must be soon. There’s either soon or too late, Louise.”

When he was awake, he was in pain. When he moved in his sleep, he was in pain. But when he truly slept, when he was as close to death as he could manage with the help of her needles, nothing hurt, he said.

But rapidity had finally arrived in the third week of September, when Edward’s nose had gone from gray and flaking to pink and weeping to green to gone.

“It’s not so nice to be ill here, either,” said Edward. The skin around his lips trembled without the lips themselves seeming to move at all; this was how he smiled now, this crinkling of papery flesh.

knew Edward wouldn’t be able to keep any promise he made to me, even if he didn’t know it himself when we were engaged. That was my first power over him: that I knew that, knew his nature, while he still had to discover it.

A bifurcated crystal, like a fragment of sleep crust, but with more solidity, and an almost enamel shine with a translucent quality, like the edge of a tooth. It vanished, not to trickle down Edward’s face, but back into his skull.

“Someone is coming. She was going to return to us in the city, but I begged her not to. She did come, once, after midnight when I lay awake and alone, with you sleeping upstairs. She knelt at my side, took my hand. She put her arm within me. I know she only agreed to wait because what was happening in there wasn’t finished. But it will be finished soon. She is coming here and we must be ready to meet her.”

I cannot explain to you how it feels because I am too cowardly to feel it.

When we met she told me her name didn’t matter, and I laughed. I told her that many of the women in places like this started out saying so, used that same tired phrase, until they had a proper employer who explained to them that men didn’t like it. That men liked to test a name on the tongue and use and own it first,

A word can have such force, and a name is an entire incantation.

I didn’t change my behaviour until my body demanded it, but you stayed with me knowing that my failures were my being, that I was not separable from them.

Jean, when we found her rooms, made love like anyone else, which is to say like you, like any of those I paid to be with when I could have been with you, because eventually I was ashamed to be with you and especially in you. Jean cost nothing, she told me so. In so many words, she said she would refuse tokens, gifts, money, anything but my body. It was not an offer I had ever heard, and the thought of my body as the offering, not the consequence of my company or my position or my funds that had to be dealt with in order to access what the woman truly wanted, I found irresistible.

It doesn’t seem fair that you have been inside my body but I haven’t been inside yours, Jean told me. That while it was Edward who had freely agreed to the taking of his body, she said, any casual watcher, any man of science observing from the corner with a chart and pencil, would observe that Edward’s body had not been given, but had instead taken Jean’s.

It was her new understanding of what she had seen coming out of the place where her husband’s eyes had been, from the glands where his tears would come from. It wasn’t a dented crystal, nor a misplaced grain of sleep. Not the lost edge of one of his teeth, emerging from a body that had lost sense of itself. Louise had seen two tiny, questing fingernails emerging from her husband’s tear ducts. When she allowed herself to remember, as the water exceeded the glass and poured coolly over her hand, she could see the pink flesh behind those nails, a vital colour totally absent from Edward’s face, from his body.

Louise looked at the shape delineated by the firelight. A flat slug with a ragged red tail, the dead leaf of a succulent. Edward’s tongue.

But there was truth to it, that Edward’s illness had caused Louise to split. Just now, the wife had seen the tongue, and the nurse had picked it up and plated it to calm the wife.

ankles back into the relative openness of the orchard. She felt her exhaustion when she tried to speak to Edward, when she felt the copper in her throat as she searched for his breath and tried to find her own.

clear line of the husband and wife’s movement. She saw what was advancing along that path, a form that almost answered her curiosity about what the inside of her husband’s body looked like. It did look like a strange flower, without leaf or stalk or stem: a dark blossom that ambulated on the tips of its six petals, with a heavy hidden pistil that glowed an obscure red against the arterially dark curtains around it. Louise didn’t move as it approached her, as it stopped in front of Edward’s body.

When it reached the threshold, a few feet in front of her, she saw that each petal had a hard tip that looked like a fingernail, white and thick against the red-black of the flower’s velvety flesh.

As she climbed the front steps, seeing that it wanted her to enter first, Louise also had the scent of it for the first time, away from the pine and apple of outside, and knew why she had followed instead of rising and running. When she smelled the flower, she knew where Edward’s blood had gone.

“You burnt his tongue, not his voice, and only the part he was using. Tongues are deep, they have a root. That root is now mine.”

“How did she make you from him?” “I wasn’t made. I led her to believe, through guidance, suggestion, through the floating motion of the form I had before this one, that she would be making something new if she followed the processes and rituals and chemical regimens found in various books that I also guided into her hands. She thinks she is coming here to find something she created, but I am something old that she has helped to bring back. And I’m sorry your husband was used to make me again.”

“If you’re sorry to have taken him, why do it at all? Why not stay in your floating motion.” “There are no ethics to wanting life. I’m not alive when I’m not incarnate. I wish to be alive.”

“I can’t choose where I will be born. I can choose who I wish to occupy. Isabel won’t leave the house with me in this form. She will want me to leave inside you. But I’ve already harmed you enough. Let me help.”

After that, she knew what Edward meant when he said he was being sipped at. This was a greedy swallow, not a sip, and her arms were following her shoulders to vanish into the trunk of his body, her eyes being drunk toward sockets that had been cleared for them months ago.

Louise felt the outside of her fingers against the inside of Edward’s as their hand curled around the doorknob. The brief suction of the two appendages, the surrounding one and the interior one, would soon become a graft, a bind, with nothing left of that gapped sensation, the flower had promised Louise.

“You’ve grown back the bits you used up,” she said. “Why? Why do that?” “A body to move in,” Louise said, with Edward’s larynx and her tongue, the new voice resonant with a fluting peak, one that she wanted to speak in for hours once Isabel Pallant was gone, when she and Edward could speak to each other aloud or quietly for hours, days, nights, while they were awake, while they slept. Their eyes began to mist, and Edward’s lips smiled, as Louise’s lips within them tried to pull them back straight an instant too late.

They could feel, in the drifting moment just before or just after sleep, a flower between and behind their lungs. Its roots wrapped around their joined vertebrae, and it grew slowly, careful not to exceed their body until they died.