Dance Down Niflheim
© 1992,1999 Andrew S. Fuller
Coming back, through a storm of wings, I feel her here. Her arm is around my middle. The night with her is the one thing I have wanted for years. Force-dreamt over and over, laid hours of restlessness in dark and morning. I smile, tuck one lip under, because I forget about teeth. Feeling her skin, her possible reality, I do not move for half an hour. I forget breath and heart beat. When she awakens, she tells me she loves me. To feel something else, to make some pain, I am silent.
It is moments like this. There is no faith, only pretending. The dead lie between. No more.
She bites my shoulder, with pressure just beyond playfulness. She must know, I think absolutely. And another moment arrives, purposeless. I want to call her a slut. She is not. But to press deeper-lift pain from its tired and used hole. I am weak, not brave enough. The moment leaves.
It is all made, blind desperate hope. Or calm denial.
She tries to look into my eyes, see what I’m thinking, and I turn to the window. I don’t like the sun, but turn to the glass and light. Turn hard and slow, breathing deep from my nose. Making another moment. She slides back to the far edge of the bed and pulls her legs in so we do not touch at all. The voice is deeper than mine, rises in my throat like a hard wind. She just as well get out, I remark.
Sobbing, she kicks at me, asking why. Her fists club my back, then pull away, fallen with heaves.
I am not very good. Can’t hold the face, or the solemnity. I am crying too. Don’t let her see. I need something against her, a piece of hate. But not now. My breath shoots out, while my eyes burn, and neck grows tight. Must get out before I say sorry.
Remember how she undressed me by the bookcase? Look long at that place as I round the bed. Keep moving. Glance at her, and nearly stop. She’s sitting up, sheets twisted around her legs and waist. Hold her or hold me. Moments jumping in the mind. Futures. So safe. Warm.
Wider pain. While I put legs into my pants, she screams that I should go leave move get out go go to Hell. Want to pull down a book, sit. My feet stamp the floor. Her voice is dead leaves on my back. The carpet muffles to softened thumps, my feet.
“Go to hell, Edgar Allen! Go burn.”
The taste is old. Remembering
She yelled hard. Did very well, convincing. Nearly frightened me. She’s full of feeling. She understands. Her forgiving will be smooth, poured glass. Cool coating. Burn me over.
The lamb comes sometimes. It asks where will you dance now, boy. So quiet. But I kill it. I keep wire inside. Strong. Cuts well. The lamb dies quickly, because I’ve learned where to cut. Don’t like it. Too white, gentle, empty. A coil, I have. Twined and wound. Not stored, but waiting. Pull. Around its neck, maybe around the middle. The wool creases. Tighten. Cut. No more bleats. Red. Line the wire. Then run onto the floor. Cover the floor. Fill the room, until the white wool is gone, sunk under. Sleeve rolled, I reach in to get my wire back. Make what you need.
• • •
She was so pure and tall. She didn’t scoff or swat me away, but looked back, not using her two eyes. With her thousand eyes she must have seen something, and dipped a twig into the paint. Tapping and dragging the twig, she made a lamb. I had told her about the lamb. She was paint for nearly an hour. The broken branch became a naked finger. And the collage grew from the lamb’s head. Paint grouped and stretched to lines, whipping around itself, making a wholeness, consuming the lamb infancy, snapping off the paper in blades and bones, swiping at me.
When the paint stopped. She was behind me. And even though she knew I was numb, she held on, squeezing hard.
• • •
They had something I want. The thing they hate. By order of the lamb, they carved it out with their fears in faith, dropped it, stepped back, cast it down, buried buried buried it, and gave it names. They held their crosses high, yelling that those against the lamb would fall. Fall to the black and red cave. To suffer.
All the time, planning on how to get there. Because it’s the darkest undersea, deepest basement, the sharpest wind. Nothing stops. It will walk me down until my eyes break. And then I’ll see. Then I’ll know what I am, and twist with, make over, break off. With dance. Can’t be wrong.
Because they hate it, maybe no reason more.
The veins on the back of my hands, I see them stand out when my arm is lowered. Curl my middle finger, and the blue vein rolls and twitches like a worm. A moment. Look here. Roll, twitch. Dance.
Because it’s the longest moment.
• • •
“Edgar Allen is what I’ll call you.” She didn’t mind my born name. “This way, you’re different with me.” A hidden name, then. Names have power, I had read.
I wanted to call her Mary Wolstonecraft. She bit me above the knee, making me grasp my leg. Emily Elizabeth, I said later, after the poet. She just got up and ran.
Leaping and flying, she careened down the hill, through the high grasses. I watched her accelerate, curve out, shrinking. Her hair was gray lights, pulled thin, trailing behind her, losing strands of dull glow with each footfall.
Leaving the park, she ran backwards, not losing step, looking over the still grass, and up to the shadow under the sky-scratching tree. When she vanished around the apartment building, I ran too. Twice I fell on the hill, tumbling with clumsy hits. My shoulder slammed. Grass cut my neck. I yelled over the park, tried her name, and others I had considered by the tree. I cried out to Gwendolyn Elizabeth. Not knowing middle names, I screamed for Toni M. and Anne S..
To feel self-pity, I let the few headlights draw their sabers over my back and sides, swinging around, I stepped in all the puddles until my pants clung cold to my shins.
At the house, the front porch was dry, untouched by dark shoe prints. The second floor window eyes were staring and lifeless. By the fence, I looked into a bush, and saw only dew lining outer leaves, like silver teeth around a deeper blackness. I turned and ran. Leviathan. It was not fear biting my neck from behind, scraping my ankles, but a festering desire I carried around my heart. I had wanted to reach into the bush-it was a maw. Some Medieval woodcuts depict Hell’s gate as Leviathan’s mouth, the biblical name for a sea monster. What a glorious passage.
Am I ready to leave? The motion of running legs might pump the urge away. The entire run, dark lawns melted by, air ran cold down my throat.
She waited for me. On the floor, a book under her head. The television scattered chaotic snow in absolute silence. Her housemates were out, the hallway doors open to more dark holes.
“Read me this.” Her eyes were still closed. She made me take it upside-down. “Don’t read the name. Just open and read.”
The verse coursed through me and out, until I forgot it was my voice, and felt myself fallen into the stanzas. There was an owl and some swans, a crow and spider. There was a path that held the forest together like twine, and a lake like a face that spared a boy’s life, a boy who couldn’t swim. When I read, she wasn’t there. Only the poems were catching me up with their glides, steps and spins. Closing the book, I told her the words danced.
“Teach me to dance.” She touched the space above her with her fingers, not getting up.
“Like this?” I put the book on her middle, and tapped its cover.
“Yes, Edgar Allen. If that’s the way you dance.”
“That’s the smaller dance, the slower.” I wanted to look at the poet’s name, but had promised. “Some night.”
“Teach me to dance, and I’ll teach you to walk wide.” She sat up and crossed her legs. “I drew madness for you. You teach me the dance. I’ll show you walking wide.”
“What is it?” I knew better. I know.
“You know better than to ask. I don’t know yet.”
“Like I’ll know the dance, when I do?”
“Yes, Edgar Allen.” She turned her head to the television, but wasn’t looking at it. “Now, spend the night with me.”
A moment I had not made. I was helpless. Hold me tight.
Turning back and down, looking at herself, she changed her mind. “No. Don’t be with me tonight.”
I echoed her. “Not tonight.”
From the floor she told me to go. It was not rejection, only wait. The poems echo cried from deep places, very faint, filling and dying out, sinking to wake other things. The old things rose up, glanced off one another, spread wings, and circled; hissing, staring. Obediently, I pulled my legs. She never opened her eyes.
• • •
The depth is gone, the promise with it. Once, I might have crawled in, and fell. But now it’s just a terrible plain bush. I can put my hand in, and find no teeth.
Nate opens the door enough for his head. “You get to any classes this week?”
I get nowhere. Go nowhere.
Save me. Make me something! Save me!!
My silence answers him. He closes the door.
• • •
“It’s all passions. And I want them. Textured and relentless.” She let me say it. “The hardest hates, swelling. The farthest loneliness, broken to sharp sand, lining empty halls.”
“Yes, you do.” Like she knew. And she was quiet, not making me worry, not being real. So gentle.
Don’t leave me. Not ever! Did I cry out? With my mouth?
“Where are you going? Where does the dance take you?”
I thought about it, knowing the end, the cavern, caressed stalactites with my mind, taking cuts from glass slivers. “Feeling won’t stop there. Around its corners.”
“Where are you dancing to?”
“She was Loki’s daughter.”
“Who is Loki?” she wanted to know.
“Loki. God of strife and fire.” I recited it like a book. “Scandinavian mythology.” She should have known.
Here the hate began, small or real. I had to tell too much. I had to tell.
She was patient. “His daughter?”
“She was cast by Odin. To dwell beneath the roots of the sacred ash, Yggdrasil.”
“Cast down? To burn?”
“To be queen of the dead.”
“Hades?” she guessed.
“Hel,” I said lightly, and spelled the difference. “Christians added a letter to her name.” She was a god, when it was Niflheim. Then she melted under time and crosses, under the new lamb, and her name became the place. It wasn’t the name. The name was a beginning, the fall. Afterwards, dreams danced the stay. Always changing, and lasting. Moments growing and gathering. Burning is not enough.
“What will you find there, Edgar Allen?”
“Myself.”
And she was quiet, filling the phone only with silence, not knowing the way I believed. Without the fire. Without the pain. Choices. Walls high, or choke. Blood or fire or pain or screams. It is like everything here now-made. It is names, until the moment.
“Can I go with you?” she asked.
My teeth are glass-smooth. Touched them. Proud, but jealous. The maw had gone, the door closed. Let me in. Spin. Dance.
“Come over,” she said, and let me hang up.
She pulled me close, pressed my head to her so I could feel her heart.
• • •
“Niflheim,” I tell the birds, not too loudly. Odin had two ravens. Hugin and Munin. But I only liked their names. All the Scandinavian ones; Aesir, Bifrost, Ragnarok, Fenris. Ideas and names. My faith is for the fallen. And there is the lamb. The lamb broke the seals, sat on the throne. Only a story. Mine goes unwrit, will be danced.
Nate is home. He plays the stereo in the living room, loud enough to pound through the walls. I pretend not to know the song, that I am lost. It’s the song I screamed for him, jumping and slapping, after the long day at the library when his backpack split open, his notes fell into the mud, and he joined. When I found the stack of books that might tell me why the lamb was too foreign, what drove the beats of the fighting birds, what was the rising mountain, why poems danced only so far, and teeth scraped at my moving feet from underneath. But there were only stories. Old myths of old cultures. And names for their gods. And names only begin. One of the couch legs popped when we jumped on it. The neighbors downstairs complained.
I pretend that my head is nodding to another song, the symphony of bones I compose in my mind, tuning for the dance to come. For a minute, I think that he doesn’t know I’m still home. But he opens the door part way. Light breaks in from the hall. The song goes louder. To keep it all out, away from the forming mouth, my nails touch my legs. Nails trace lines. From knee to thigh. White skin. Red. Until it burns and stings loud enough, that I can look away, deaf.
Two immense forms dive in, strike. Tumble back, shrieking.
• • •
The front door was open. Nate was at work and class. At the bottom of the stairs, by the screen door, I looked out. She moved away, along the street. From the front walk, I saw her turn the corner. The note was still in my hand. The smell was rain. Ink streaks bled down my arm. In afternoon light, the shallow empty inside of the bush was opening to catch falling water.
• • •
“She doesn’t wanna” It’s not her. But I hear her in the background. “Give it to me,” she says, her voice thick with crying. Her housemate sighs heavily.
“What could you want?”
“To be sorry,” I say, “To see you.”
“Not after the other morning. I shouldn’t need remind you.”
“Wanted. Just see you.”
“Not again. You took my life, and you ate it. And I have to limp, having not danced. And I’ll sit in the dark for weeks. And I hate you. And I’m taking the name back. Die, Edgar Allen.”
I want to tell her she ate my life too, that she is too much to be real. That I don’t know if I am real. That I want the name back, willingly given. That I thought she understood. The passion. Make moments. Fill each moment, until the cavern, the roots of the sacred ash. Tend pain, until the place of corners and continuity. The dance.
She seemed to know.
“You seemed to know.”
“I didn’t know. And it stings. I’m not like you.”
“Want to see you.”
“Shut up, Philip. Go burn.”
She does know, maybe. She’s making it easy. Easy for me to hurt, run, fall through and find. And make. And dance. The cavern. She couldn’t with me. There are no partners. One rule, maybe. She should know.
Wider the pain.
She knows. Maybe.
• • •
• • •
Beaks flash through my head. The transmission sticks.
It’s three hours to the mountain.
Past tree line, there are only the heads of black rocks, buried low.
The bowl howls through its wide, curved open chamber, hurling white ice about within. I lean into the steepness until I can’t hear.
The crow falls, flipping awkwardly, single wing bent, the bloody rip spattering the sky. Above, the owl drops the black wing, soars. Its glide falters. Eyes glazed, it plummets. The wound from the crow beak, a wet red hole through the heart, is turned to the clouded sun. Music comes from both the falling bodies. Hollow racing chorus. Thousand bones rung and struck.
No more wind. A bright warmth, calm. The dance begins. Here is your theme, familiar at once. Listen. Heated air of deaf screams runs out of my throat, through my flailing arms; as I curse, praise and beat the heavy white, wailing for it to creep, then jump, and slide; take me down, roaring through the black pine teeth, to some colder pit.
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