Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

He had been soft, sensitive, silent, acquiescent, almost servile until he sent them up the coast one summer and left a note at home explaining where upon their return they would find sufficient funds for consecutive lifetimes of indulgence.

Money had been attracted to him as though by magnets, yet having been born into it, he never seemed to have a need for it. His persistent dream had been to free himself of omnipresent desire around him. Or at least attain the open stretches of time the last decade in the pines had provided. For a decade now, he raised livestock and made irregular excursions to Philadelphia for books and other essentials required to pass the days alone. A Swede had built the house with the hope of turning the region into a retreat for anyone with money attracted to the endless protection of millions of pines. But no one came other than a handful of friends who stayed for free during autumn masquerades.

Education would make me more of a man, Larner said, and I wanted that more than anything, not yet secure in my own odd skin. Cursed at birth et cetera. As I told Larner about the Pastor who had banished me, I watched as lore alighted as real life.

It was nearly dawn. We neither yawned nor lost our animation. Night grayed as the candles dropped. Day rose like crystalline water, enhanced by thick panes of glass imported from Sweden, a land Larner said was mostly ice.

“But why did you venture from the island?” said Larner.

Slowly releasing the rush of words that came to mind, I told him of my clamshell home and creeping development along the southern coast and bay. I mentioned the woman who walked along the beach every day and stood on the balcony holding an unlit lantern through storms.

“I wanted to talk to her but how?” I said. “She had no face, and yet she sang.”

I listed my other companions over the years: wind, sand, salt, seaweed, sun, stars, surf, crabs, clams, gulls whose courage I rewarded with scraps of food. Storms, too, I described, great sets of waves, low tides, red seas. I released a century’s worth of impressions of a world that had been my only companion. The mysterious woman who walked along the shore, singing, veiled, holding an unlit lantern, faceless, Larner recognized as the widow of a sailor whose ship had crashed along the island’s northernmost rocks. The entry to the bay was treacherous, so now ships preferred the southern inlet, but it took many disasters before the lesson was learned. Lore had it that a widow walked the beach in search of her lost sailor.

“But why without face or head?” he said. “That’s not part of the legend.”

He said there was another legend about a pirate decapitated after helping Blackbeard bury treasure along the northern coast. But this woman was not a pirate. Why would she be headless? And why would she walk the beach forever? And how, without a head to hold a pair of eyes, would she manage to see her husband return from the waters? And if this sailor saw her, even if his skin were stripped by thousands of fish and his bones were encrusted with barnacles, how would he feel to emerge from icy ocean water after so many years to see this woman without a head waiting for him? Would he recognize her? Or, thanks to her fidelity, would he overlook the fact that she now had no head?

We slept most of the next day. Larner did, at least. I needed only an intermittent hour. Not so with an old man who spent the day snoring as I explored the house, the longest time ever spent inside. It seemed like a labyrinth of endless corridors in which space expanded and with it a sense of possibility. It was like living inside the royal oak I had spent so much time atop on Daniel Leeds’s land, a long trunk with numerous branches, a place that seemed to have a life of its own—a mind, too, and not a cordial one.

I was sure the house had it in for me, manipulating me toward some unforeseen pitfall. This Larner lured monsters with delectable rabbits, seduced them with friendship and kind words as the monster, like all monsters, stepped from monsterhood toward, it hoped, a semblance of human decency. The host then let his prey wander his endless home and caught the gullible monster in a trap of disorientation.

Outside, whenever lost, I soared and established my position from above. I was not yet frantic enough to burst through a window, that is, if I could—the Swedish glass seemed so thick an attempt to break it might prove fatal, even for me. Through the walls Larner’s faint ALLOOOs sounded like they originated inside me, achy vibrations in my bones, felt more than heard. If this was what it meant to be a man—to build such terribly branching hallways, to banish and curse, to seek and destroy, to differentiate like this—why learn their ways, study their language, emulate their behavior? Much better to spend time with the greenflies and gulls that worshipped me, the maggots in salt-wet driftwood, the gleaming curves of porpoises, the holy sight of a whale breaching the ocean surface, its spout and spray more serviceable and beneficent than that remarkably odd and varied species that referred to itself as humanity.

“ALLOOO!”

What if I panicked and punished Larner for failing to warn me of the house’s complexities? How ridiculous to survive the night only to have his home incite, by architectural idiosyncrasy, his end? Larner had surely imagined a more strapping beast, with pectoral muscles like a pair of shields, a neck of ropey veins, vibrant brick-colored skin, more a traditional Satan than this ungainly miscellany trapped in its body like the most uncomfortable man.

ALLLOOOOO!”

I moved in the direction of his voice but came no closer to it. At first I had sensed bemused appreciation for whatever drew me to this estate. Toward the center of the pines I should stay, venture deeper into it, and more thoroughly enclose myself from those unwilling to accept such an unfamiliar configuration of limbs and skin. A shriek formed within me. Lost in the contorted wings of the house, there was no escape. An hour ago it had seemed a sanctuary, not a living hell. My human heart (autopsy would reveal it) pumped desperation as it restrained a shockwave that would charge these corridors with terror. I sounded like a whipped dog. A scared dependent creature. And hearing it, registering it, an exhalation fogged the air in front of me as though my breath were smoke. A living dragon, they said. If only fire burst from my lungs…

Larner called ALLOOO. There I was, a child lost in some crowded marketplace as evening fell and the faces of vendors turned gruesome in the lantern light. I ran claws across my head as though shearing myself, wings back, tail coiled and tucked between heronlike legs.

“Alloooo,” quietly now, “allooooo,” more like shush shush to ease discomfort. “Allloooo, all’s well, all’s well, I should have warned you from wandering this way. This must be more than you can handle so soon upon ending your exile.”

How soft the voice, yet all was less than fine. I never expected to display such sensitivities to my new companion. Better to roar and keep him from stroking the stripe of fur across my forehead. Impossible to trust someone who took me seriously, who offered sympathy as though he derived pleasure only from placation.

I attempted a short roar. But too accustomed to sighs, I chortled, as though I had mastered at last the art of laughter.

“We’ll take a trip,” he said, “We’ll call on the veiled woman, bring her flowers, woo her perhaps, see if she can’t teach us a thing or two.”

I envisioned open travel on land with Larner, trees the only walls on either side of the road.

Late September light—sky and rivers letting out a last gasp— opened a door through which I imagined a more beautiful life. Larner’s own father had not made it past his present age, he told me. His mother had gone a decade before that. Rarely did one reach winter, let alone the depths of autumn. Yet Larner claimed he already occupied the afterlife. I was evidence of his ascent.