Chapter 3 The Body

A body lies in a forest. A body breaks out of a world. Which body am I, the hare or the worm? I am both at once. I am the creator of a strange new religion, high priest of a rite of my own invention. I give and take. I shiver and shake. I'm through, I'm through; it's like coming up from underwater. It's like breaking the surface, my hair whipping back and heavy as I gasp for breath—I can't yet draw breath—in a new world.

The air tastes different here. Everything is different. Bodies, lives, and histories: these are things more porous than I learned in school. The spaces between their particles and animalcules are vast; they interpenetrate, they assonate, they rhyme. He and I—she and I—the two of us go together, but we are not a we like the ghost children; that much we learned from television. We are the eye that opens. Why can't I breathe yet?

We already can't tell which of us is which, but it's all right, we'll carry each other. We'll take turns being an I, red, weary, wary. I'm unsteady on the surface of a new world that quakes with my passing, a water-strider holding my breath, the wasp at the tip of the spear—why can't I breathe?

Am I not done dying yet? Sacrifice is strange, from either side of the rite. Did she kill me to leap out of our world in the wake of my death? Did I kill him and wrap his death around me like a shroud, like a shield, like an exoskeleton for navigating between worlds? Our perspectives switching back and forth is dizzying, painful at the moments of transition, as if my eyeballs were being squeezed out of their sockets and then back in. I flail and I thrash, or I try, but the body lies still. I am not I, nor I; not yet, never quite, never again.

I have passed through the film—no, the text, they haven't made a film—but did it pop like a soap bubble or is it still there somewhere behind me? I have been translated into a tongue I don't have in my mouth. No. I have been interpolated into a text already published. I am reborn to redie, another I to learn, another body, another history, another life: it seems this is the price of translation. I made myself porous to pass through, but what I pore through pours through me.

It's all right, it's all right, I'm used to possession. I had a devil in me the whole time, didn't I? I'm used to using someone else's face as a mirror. I'm used to being the mirror. I've always carried more than one tongue in my mouth, ever since that day in the forest. Oh, I surprise myself with that memory. I am a stranger to myself. You think you know someone, until you try to fuck them, until you kill them, until you become them and find the secrets they carried all along.

That possession taught me how to pass. I understand now. The devil taught me; I am the devil, so I was my own teacher. I accept the consequences.

I leave that emptying realm for the next; to pass through is to pass out, to drain through the brane and complain about the brain on the wane. I try to laugh and it bubbles in my mouth, in my neck. There's something in my mouth. I can't breathe.

There is something in my mouth. I try to feel its texture with my tongue, but I can't move. I taste of betel and tobacco. I remember spitting red. I remember spitting blood.

I sift through my memories old and new and new-new. I spare a thought for my mother, next to last of a long line of witches. I think about my father, scientist and historian. I learn the ropes. I learn the tropes. I'm in the megatext. I'm in the deep end. I didn't think it would hurt this much.

I understand. This is my initiation.

In every world, I'll look for the revolution. I am the last of a long line of witches.

Mother told me it would be like this.