My name is William Singleton. Back when I had friends, they called me Will, so I suppose you folks can call me that too. I’ve noticed some of you flinching at my disfigurement, so what-say we get the first (and probably the smallest) elephant out of the room, eh? Some of my more diehard readers might call me ”handsome,” save for this big ol’ scar. How I came by it is one of my reasons for visiting the Canyon. The others? That’s a hell of a lot more complicated.
I’ve been to the Canyon once before, many years ago. I was ten years old, so this would have been back in the summer of 1973. My father was an English professor at the University of Chicago. My mother was what they used to call a ‘housewife’ back then. They’d been sweethearts since their college days, practically joined at the hip by their shared love of Soul music, old movies, and the “Great Outdoors.” My sister Francine and I were usually less enthusiastic. Movies were supposed to be in color and camping was for rich white kids from the suburbs.
Francine … Frankie, was killed by a drunk driver when I was eight years old. She was twelve when she died. I won’t go into great detail about what the death of a child can do to a family. To my parents’ credit, or deficit, they rarely let me see them grieving. Sometimes there were bumps in the road: flashes of pain that tore away the façade and revealed how we’d been maimed by loss.
But my parents were tough, and they expected the same toughness from me, so I did my best. After a while, I shut my sister away in a tiny room in my mind, and I turned out the light and locked the door.
Since my father was off for most of every summer, my folks had made it a yearly tradition to drag the family to one of our nation’s national parks. Frankie’s death had taken the spirit out of my parents, and for the next two years we’d stayed home; three strangers who’d lost the element that made us a family.
We were only three weeks into that summer vacation of 1973 when my father, during dinner one night, announced that we were getting out of Chicago. One week later, they’d packed us up, and the three of us headed west.
We’d barely left the house and I was already pining for Frankie. She should have been sitting on the other side of our ’71 Grand Safari station wagon with her arms crossed and her eyes squeezed shut, so annoyed by the prospect of the endless miles she’d have to spend entertaining me with games like “Let’s Count the Red Cars,” or “Find the Black People in These Postcards!” (There were never any black people in the postcards my mother collected at every rest stop.)
That summer however, we’d begun the journey saddled by the weight of Frankie’s absence. As we pulled out of our driveway I saw my mother staring out her window, her forehead pressed to the glass as she wiped away tears, as if she didn’t want me or my father to see what was plain to all. However, by the time we were out of the city and heading west on Interstate 80, the mood in the car had lightened. My father even took on the responsibility of suggesting new road games.
Time and memory seem to distort themselves these days; old age I guess, but I can’t recall much more of that outbound trip; mostly because it’s been overshadowed by the events that happened on the fourth day.
Six families would spend the next five nights at the site below the Canyon’s South Rim: Angel Campground. Our hired guides had patiently advised us while we selected horses. Then our group descended the Bright Angel Trail.
At the halfway point I looked back from the front of the line, past my mother’s distracted smile and my father debating politics with a businessman who was also from Chicago. The long line of sweaty city-folk peppered the air with gasps of wonder or shouted questions as we passed groves occupied by flora native to the Canyon: white fir and blue spruce, ponderosa pine, and Utah juniper trees.
I was dazzled by the infinite shades of red and gold, and how the play of sunlight seemed to animate the stone walls all around us, making faces or animal shapes. By the time we set up our encampment, well … to say that I was bewitched would be an understatement.
On that fourth morning of the trip all the interested kids, about twelve in total, were allowed to venture away from the campsite on the condition that we stayed together and in sight of the river. Armed with long, pointed sticks in case we encountered rattlesnakes, we headed west, following the flow of the Colorado River.
We’d barely been walking for five minutes when I lost sight of the tall girl in front of me; a pretty, Jewish brunette from Milwaukee named Eileen. I was following her; about six paces behind—she walked fast—while behind me trudged five younger kids and the two thirteen-year olds who formed the rear guard. I was ambling along, happily dumbstruck by the sights and sounds, when I noticed Eileen was gone. I stopped, looked behind me and saw that the other kids had also vanished. I was alone.
“Will Singleton. That’s a nice name.”
I turned toward the sound of that voice and saw the oddest thing: There was a woman standing in the river.
She was Native American, her long black hair free and falling nearly to her waist. She was dressed, oddly, in a silver, form-fitting bodysuit that covered her from her neck to her ankles. Only her brown hands and feet were bare. Red gems sparkled at the shoulders, along the arms and down the sides of her silver suit. The gems reflected sunlight so that the woman appeared to inhabit the eye of a whirlwind formed from concentrated sunlight.
Somehow, she was standing on the water.
For a moment, I thought I heard Eileen yelling my name, but the echo was disrupted by the glowing lady’s voice.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Her voice was strong, airy, like a steady breeze blowing through a forest of wind chimes. When she smiled, the sunlight seemed to coalesce around her until she was cocooned in living flame. But I wasn’t afraid. Something in the glowing lady’s eyes seemed to cloak me in assurances. The feeling of welcome that radiated from her reminded me of Christmas dinners we’d spent with my Aunt Charlotte; my mother’s bosomy best friend.
“Folks around here call me Silver Woman,” she said in that ringing wind chime voice. “It’s time to go. We’ve already lost the day.”
At the mention of time, I tore my eyes away from Silver Woman and was amazed: Night had fallen over the canyon. My position on the riverbank hadn’t changed, but now the woman was standing next to me. Again, I heard people—Eileen, my parents—calling for me.
“Will?” “William!”
I felt a vague sense of movement, as if the world were turning around me, and I saw the red sun sink below the bluffs to the west. The distant howl of a coyote startled me, and then I found myself gasping at the shock of freezing water rushing over my naked skin.
I was looking into Silver Woman’s eyes. They were vast and black as the space between stars, and as she held me in that roaring current she touched my forehead with one finger.
“This river is our blood,” she sang.
Then she traced streaks of ice across my cheeks and down my throat.
“This land is our body.”
Suddenly there was movement in the darkness around us, an intrusion by something that felt like … I can only call it a presence.
“A soul,” Silver Woman whispered. “A very big soul.”
This shadow soul felt enormous as it shouldered its way into my awareness. I felt the heat of its breath, and heard its deep, rumbling growl. This soul was filled with rage, or a grief so vast that, to my childish perceptions, it felt like rage. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to become invisible.
“I have to go now,” I whispered.
“Remember, little brother,” Silver Woman sang.
“One day you will see my token and remember what’s true.”
When I opened my eyes, my father was gripping me by the shoulders. He was crying and his shirtfront was covered in blood.
We were in a small ranger’s station, surrounded by a dozen older white men. Some of them were wearing park ranger uniforms. Somebody took my picture. Then someone else took another one. Then I was dazzled by a storm of flashing lights while the men shouted questions.
“Where’s Mom,” I said. “Where’s Mom?”
My father was hugging me so tightly I could barely breathe. Normally clean-shaven—he was a former Air Force captain who shaved every day, even on vacation—now he looked as if he’d been hollowed out; his cheeks covered by a scraggly beard.
“What happened,” he said. He looked feverish, like a man in the throes of delirium. “We thought … your mother thought … My God, Will! Where were you?”
Then someone brought my mother in and the whole crying thing started all over again. It was only later, amidst more tears, and questions from the police, that I realized I was forgetting Silver Woman. The harder I tried to recall her face, the more it receded from my memory. I was angry. I wanted to remember all of it.
Later that night, as my dad slept, exhausted, on the hotel room’s spare twin bed, my mother was sitting next to me on the sofa. I’d bathed earlier, but I was so intent on trying to hold on to my visit with Silver Woman I hadn’t noticed that the tub was filled with red water.
“We looked all over for you,” my mother said. “Dozens of people came with dogs, two helicopters … Even family from Chicago flew out to help, but we couldn’t find you.”
“I’m sleepy,” I muttered.
My memories of the glowing woman—
The shining lady?
—were fading, but we’d never left that spot along the riverbank; and we were together for no longer than an hour.
“That ranger opened up his station this morning and found you sleeping inside,” my mother said. “You had … a lot of blood on you, and you were naked and … Will?”
“Yeah?”
“Who gave you that blanket?”
“What blanket?”
“The one you were wrapped in. The ranger said it was Navajo. Hand-woven. It looked very … expensive.”
“I don’t remember,” I groaned. “Tired.”
“That ranger’s station is in the Superstition Mountains, William,” my mother said. “That’s nearly two- hundred miles from our campsite.”
“It was Frankie,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Frankie. She gave me the blanket.”
I fell asleep.
Over the next few days I would learn why my parents were so worried. The ranger had found me on that frosty morning, naked and covered from head to toe in dried blood.
I had been missing for nearly a month.
My adventure seems like a dream to me now, like scenes from an old movie that I once loved and then forgot. That’s what allows us to move on: Time. And “move on” is just what I did.
By my senior year of high school everyone except my parents had forgotten about the South Side boy who’d vanished in the Grand Canyon only to turn up, unharmed, a month later. There were questions of course, but since I couldn’t remember anything, I simply made things up until my answers didn’t please anyone. Eventually, everyone left me alone.
College is a blur: I studied. I earned several degrees.
It was while I was working as an editor for the Denver Plainsman that I got the idea for the story that would eventually become the Spectre & Sparrow books.
Ah, now I see a few light bulbs going off.
I wrote book one: Spectre & Company, the year I turned thirty: 1988. For those unfamiliar, it’s the story of cyborg Commander Artemis Spectre and her intelligent starship, Sparrow. Together they battle an invading army of alien pirates from a distant galaxy.
That first book sold well enough that I was able to quit the editing job after a year to focus on writing the next one. Book two, The Planet Pirates, sold well enough that Hollywood took notice. Three years later, the film version of Spectre & Company was a box office smash.
I was paid an equally phenomenal amount of money to write book three: Sparrowhawk; book four: Hunting Spectres; book five: Sparrow Rebellion, and book six: The Veil War. All were international bestsellers. The first three films were unqualified box office hits. The Veil War film was halfway through production when the 911 attacks shut down New York City.
I was in my late forties by then, and between book deals and movie rights I’d made more than enough money to call myself a successful author. I’d moved to L.A. and had been living there for ten years when I met Lisette McGee.
Now, I can’t tell you much about this scar if I don’t tell you about my lifelong fascination with, let’s call them, “difficult” women.
We’ve all met people so physically beautiful they drive folks of both sexes to distraction; or romantic types, who can write love letters with one hand and pick your pocket with the other, while sharpening a hatchet with their feet. Lisette McGee was such a person.
She was a coldblooded trickster motivated by unbridled ambition and her fading beauty: a weaponized sex-doll who targeted softhearted men with hardwired assets. I caught her cheating on me two months into our marriage. A month later, I’d filed for an annulment and avoided certain financial doom.
But the small banalities of human nature can lead us into the foulest waters, and Lisette was nothing if not banal. By far, the most annoying of her many self-contradictions was her public devotion to her “spirituality.”
She’d hounded me about going to church. And no matter which of her other sponsors she may have screwed on any given Saturday night, Lisette never missed a Sunday morning sermon, courtesy of Home For The Heart International Ministries in Christ, LLC.
H.H.M. was the most recent example of the “mega churches” that had begun to proliferate around the country by the nineteen-eighties. Thanks to popular “televangelists” like Pat Robertson and his 700 Club, or Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, the mega church phenomenon had spawned a multi-billion dollar global industry by the time I met the founder and head pastor of Home For The Heart Ministries.
I’d been separated from Lisette for nine months when Peter Scanlon, an old editor and good friend, called me up.
“I’m in L.A. to moderate a writer’s panel at the ‘Sci-Fac’ Convention,” he said. “Let’s get together and drink, you bastard!”
Over the last several decades he’d edited more than two dozen multi-author anthologies covering a broad spectrum of genres. Each one had swiftly climbed the bestseller lists and his legion of fans had deemed Scanlon “The Godfather of Popular Fiction.” Lonely and bored, I agreed to meet him the next day.
I passed mostly unnoticed among the mobs of fans and cosplayers that swarmed the Sci-Fac! (Short for Science Faction!) at L.A.s Convention Center: By 2008 the Spectre & Sparrow films had faded from the movie-going public’s awareness since their big-screen debut twenty years earlier. The actors had aged and moved on to greater or lesser successes: none more tragically, perhaps, than the star of the original franchise.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll get to the calamity that befell Vanessa Warcloud in due time.
I’d come to accept a measure of anonymity by July of 2008. Harry Potter was hot: both the books and the films. And with the rising popularity of warmed-over “reboots”, from Star Wars, to Lethal Weapon, to Batman … the adventures of my band of intrepid space heroes had fallen out of fashion.
I’d landed a few production deals with some major studios, so I tried my hand as a “script doctor.” But I quickly discovered that “punching up” other writers’ work while sober was like polishing turds for an audience of monkeys. I’d pitched a few original screenplays and found that process so blisteringly dull it made me feel suicidal.
The Spectre & Sparrow books were still popular, but the place from whence I’d drawn that inspiration had dried up. When I allowed myself to be honest, I was forced to acknowledge the creeping suspicion that I was finished: washed up at forty-nine years old.
That something inside me had begun to rot.
After spending the afternoon watching Scanlon field questions from his devoted fans, we’d skipped the official meet & greet and headed to a bar I knew just up the road in the city of Santa Monica. Five hours later, after too much Jack Daniels and not enough “dinner,” we were walking back to our cars when we passed an empty tennis court.
Emboldened by whiskey and feeling jealous of Scanlon’s relevance, I bet him fifty bucks that I could jump over the tennis net without disturbing it. Before he could agree, I took three steps and vaulted over the net. On the way, my left foot snagged one of the holes at the top of the net. I twisted in mid-air and crashed sideways onto the court.
After I’d dusted myself off and assured him I was okay, Scanlon climbed into his convertible, still chuckling, and sped off. I took five steps toward my car before my left leg went wobbly, promptly collapsed, and dumped me on my ass again. I didn’t speculate about the damage: The pain that blazed up the back of my left calf was informative.
Cursing myself for fool, I managed to stand on my uninjured right leg, hop the rest of the way to my car and drive myself to Cedar Sinai.
“You’ve got a partial rupture of the left Achilles Tendon,” the on-duty orthopedist informed me, some three hours later. “That big tough ligament that runs from your heel up to the back of the knee twisted when you tripped. Lucky for you it only tore. If that bad boy snaps, you’d need surgery to reconnect the torn ends.”
After being fitted for an orthopedic “shoe” to restrict foot movement, I was given a pair of crutches, a prescription for pain meds and discharge papers assuring me that my ruptured tendon would heal on its own.
Feeling lower than at any other time I could remember, I rode a wheelchair through the exit to the emergency room’s parking lot and into a rare L.A. rainstorm.
“You got a ride comin?” Oscar, the cheerful orderly attached to the wheelchair asked. “Can’t drive all fucked up on those meds.”
“No. I’m alone.”
“I’ll call you a taxi,” the orderly said, just as a new Lincoln Town Car rolled up to the curb and stopped right in front of me. The driver’s door opened and the driver, a black man of average height and build, jumped out. He was dressed in a well-tailored black suit and wore perfectly shined black ankle boots.
The driver produced a large umbrella from somewhere inside the Lincoln. Then he ran around to the rear passenger door and opened it.
Have you ever recognized a stranger? Or found yourself driving through a completely new town, certain somehow, that you’ve been there before?
The woman seated in the back seat of the Lincoln was a stranger. But every one of my senses expanded at the sight of her. Something opened up inside of me, something like panic, or euphoria. Wet and woozy, I was immediately sobered by her: flummoxed into silence. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Like the driver, the woman was black, only of a lighter complexion, with smooth reddish-brown skin. Her hair, shielded from the rain, was dark brown and straight, smoothly tied back into an immaculate bun. Full red lips complimented eyes that glinted a light amber-brown.
The driver handed the woman the umbrella and stepped back. Then the woman stepped out of the limo.
I imagine it was the thing about her that attracted stares whenever she entered a room; comments tossed up from bold children while their nervous parents made jokes about “the weather up there.”
The beautiful woman was tall.
Seated in my wheelchair it was hard to estimate her actual height, but I guessed she must have stood nearly seven feet tall. Her body was strongly built, with broad straight shoulders and the narrow waist of a professional athlete. She was wearing a black business suit with a white blouse, open at the collar. Her hair had been perfectly coiffed, with a single white rose pinned over her left ear.
“Will Singleton,” she said; not a question. An assertion. A declaration. “I’m here to collect you.”
Her voice was low without being heavy, the thalassic thrum of a cello sonata played under water.
“You’d better close that or the rain’ll get in.”
I shut my mouth.
The tall woman looked to be in her early-thirties, but her smile gave me a glimpse of how she might have looked as a teenager. As she must have looked when we’d known each other in that other life.
“I don’t understand,” I stammered. “I … uh … I called a taxi.”
“Lisette called and asked if I would pick you up,” the tall woman said. “Stan and I were on our way home from a brunch when she reached me.”
“Lisette? I don’t under …”
“You listed her as your emergency contact,” the tall woman said. “But since you guys are estranged … well she thought it might be better if a third party came for you.”
I vaguely remembered putting Lisette’s name down as an emergency contact somewhere. Now I didn’t know whether to be grateful or annoyed.
“Force of habit,” I said. “We were only married for a few months.”
“Oh, I know,” the tall woman said. “I helped her through that transition. You ought to reach out to her, by the way. She’s thriving these days.”
“Oh,” I offered, not knowing what else to say.
“If you’ll tell Stan where you parked your car, he can have someone bring it to you tomorrow morning,” the tall woman said. “I assume you can’t drive while you’re jacked up on all that nasty old pain medication.”
“I don’t … I’m not sure …”
“No problem at all, Mister Singleton,” the driver said. “I’m Stan Carpenter, personal assistant to the Reverend Doctor. I’m a big fan of your work. I bought Spectre & Sparrow in hardcover and it still holds a place of honor on my bookshelf. It would be my honor to personally see to it that you and your car make it home all in one piece.”
The driver laughed at his own joke.
That sense of dislocation, of separation, rose up in me again. I was painfully aware of how I must have looked to her: foolish, middle-aged, clumsy, and I felt ashamed.
Don’t, little brother, someone, probably the Vicodin, whispered. Some things are bigger than they seem.
The tall woman extended her hand toward me. Her fingers were long and perfectly manicured. Each of her nails had been painted the color of fresh blood, and a tiny diamond, adorned the center of each cuticle.
“I’m Ursula Crusher,” she volunteered, flashing that dazzling smile. “Shall we?”
That is how I fell into the shadow of the Reverend Doctor Ursula Lee Crusher. Hell, I’ll admit that I was already in love; too bedazzled by this deity from another reality to even suspect something I wouldn’t learn until far too late: That when I stepped into her town car I was stepping away from my dreams, my world.
Even my sanity.
It’s not exactly cutting-edge storytelling to write about the funny nature of time; how it steals life and dulls desire; how it shatters hearts and teaches its beautiful, brutal lessons to each of us, leaving hard-earned wisdoms in its wake.
We were on our honeymoon the first time Ursula hit me.
I proposed marriage to her six months after we met. She’d nursed me through my rehabilitation, driven me to my physical therapy sessions and even taught me new exercises to strengthen my injured leg.
She played basketball all through high school and college, and even played professionally for the Chicago Fire. Her greatest achievement, she told me over dinner one night, was when she’d played for the U.S. Women’s Basketball team at the 1996 Olympics.
Unfortunately, a knee injury ended Ursula’s career. But her knowledge of physical therapy techniques was invaluable.
We’d been married for a year, but the honeymoon I’d planned was delayed because of Ursula’s church commitments. I’d learned, after our yearlong courtship, that Home For The Heart Ministries was more than her life’s work; it was her calling.
“Sometimes personal stuff has to come second, babe,” she’d reply, after I’d expressed my concerns about her schedule. I was still smarting from Lisette and her betrayals. Now that I’d found real love I had no intention of letting it slip through my fingers.
“The Devil doesn’t slow down, babe,” she said, offering me a half-smile while she punched in the next number. “God’s people gotta keep it movin.’”
We were driving north along the coastal route. To our left, the Pacific Ocean sprawled, opulent and endless, beneath a turquois blue sky. But I was itching to get to San Francisco. Ursula had been shouting marching orders to her team back at church headquarters since we’d left Los Angeles.
“Pull over at the next stop,” she said, ending a call. “I gotta pee.”
I was happy to comply. I’d held a death grip on the steering wheel all the way from Santa Barbara. Tension had branched out from my shoulders, spread down my spine, and finally set up shop in my lower back. Nearly two years after my “tennis accident,” my left leg had never regained full strength. The long drive had inevitably caused my foot and ankle to stiffen up. I needed to do my daily calf stretches.
While I was bending and twisting on a small plot of grass near the ladies room, a middle-aged woman approached me.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you somebody?”
“Will Singleton,” I said. “I’m an author.”
“Oh my God,” the woman drawled. “I knew it! You’re the guy who wrote the books about the robot lady, Captain Spectre!”
“That’s right,” I said. “She’s a cyborg, by the way.”
“Oh, my son loves those books! And the movies too, of course! But he really loves the books because they encouraged him to read and I was so grateful for that because before I got him those books, he was practically illiterate. Do you mind if I get an autograph? It would mean so much to Brian.”
“Of course.”
I was surprised at how good it felt to greet a fan.
“Wow,” I said. “Nice to know someone’s still enjoying the stories.”
The woman rummaged around in her purse, pulled out an ink pen and a crumpled theater program and handed them to me.
“I was looking for you,” Ursula said. “Where’d you go?”
“Just took a walk to stretch my legs. Ursula, this is, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Elizabeth Wiley,” the mother of Brian said. Then she turned to Ursula. “We’re huge fans of your dad’s.”
I laughed. I was fifty-one that year. Ursula was only thirty-four.
“She’s not my daughter,” I said, chuckling. “She’s my wife.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “My goodness. And tall as a Utah Juniper tree! I must say: you’re a very lucky woman!”
Ursula’s face was still, her lower jaw tightly clenched as if she were gritting her teeth. The expression was new to me.
“So nice to make your acquaintance!” Elizabeth Wiley said. “Brian is gonna shit an anvil when I tell him I met you!”
As the woman drove away, I turned back to Ursula.
“That was funny, eh?”
Ursula slapped me. There was no warning, the movement so quick I’d barely registered it. I wasn’t even sure what had happened until the right side of my face began to throb, grow warm, then hot. The slap echoed in the silence of the empty rest stop like a gunshot.
“Hey,” I gasped. “Ursula, what …?”
She grabbed me by the left wrist and squeezed it.
“Shut up,” she snarled, and before I could object, she slapped me again. “Shut. Up!”
Ursula wheeled around and hauled me back toward the restrooms. Stunned, it was all I could do to stay on my feet as she dragged me behind her.
“Ursula! Wait!”
It was no use: she still worked out five times a week, and she was far stronger than the average woman. And although my Achilles tendon had healed, all that physical therapy had failed to restore the strength and balance I’d lost to atrophy during my twelve-week recovery.
“Ow! Hey!” I shouted
She dragged me behind the restrooms and up a small hill that led to another picnic area enclosed by a ring of trees.
“People thinkin’ they can humiliate somebody,” she hissed, so quietly that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it correctly. “… let you make a damn fool outta me you got another ‘think’ coming.”
She didn’t stop until she’d dragged me across the picnic area and into the little copse of trees. Then, she whirled around and faced me.
“You think that’s funny? What she said?”
“Ursula … I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You know goddamn well what I’m talkin’ about, William,” she snarled, tightening her grip on my wrist.
“Ursula, you’re hurting … Owwww … that hurts!”
“You think any of this is funny?” she said. Then she threw back her head and screamed, “Answer me!”
I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure I was awake. As if to prove the point, Ursula elbowed me in the left temple hard enough to knock me down. I lay there on my back seeing stars.
When my vision cleared, the woman towering over me bore little resemblance to the woman who’d spent the last year and a half nursing me back to health. I’d seen her angry before, of course. But this was different. Not anger. This was something else.
I got one leg under me and tried to stand. Ursula rushed toward me, clearing the distance in a single stride, and kicked me in the chest. I staggered back and my right hip struck the edge of a picnic table. I lost balance and fell to my hands and knees.
“Wait,” I gasped. “Ursula, listen to me! I think …”
“You think,” Ursula said. “You. Think.”
I tasted blood, swallowed a little, and realized she’d cut my lower lip when she struck me with her elbow.
Ursula put her foot on my chest and pressed me down onto the grass. She was wearing casual walking shoes, but the heel was hard enough that I could feel her grinding it into my sternum.
“Now, I’m going back to the car. You are gonna stay here and think about what just happened. And when you think you got it figured out, then you can come out and tell me what the fuck you find so goddamm funny.”
She held me there, her size thirteen sneaker pressing down for another agonizing instant. Then she was gone.
I lay there, gasping as air flooded back into my body, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Ursula had never struck me before; never gotten angry enough to hit anyone that I knew of. But there I lay, bruised, busted lip and all.
I know what some of you are thinking. I should have run. I should have done a million other things than the one thing I did: I lay there in the grass.
And I thought about what I’d found so goddamn funny.
By the time I thought I’d figured it out and walked back to the car, the old Ursula, the familiar Ursula had returned. She was sitting in the passenger seat, checking emails.
“Have you figured out what you did?”
I should have walked into the men’s room, locked myself into a stall and called the police. I should have called someone from the goddamn writers guild. Anything.
“She laughed,” I said. “That woman thought you were my daughter. I guess she thought it was funny.”
“Did you think it was funny?”
“No … Ursula …”
“So why did you laugh? Were you trying to embarrass me?”
My brain was clicking along at a mile per second; retracing steps I’d taken in a different reality: Had I laughed? Had I flirted with the woman? What had I done?
“She was a fan,” I pleaded, hating the tremor I heard in my voice. “Her son was a fan. I was just being polite.”
“But we both know what you were really doing.” Ursula focused on her phone. Her eyes never left its screen. “Don’t we?”
She was still smiling, the smile so similar to the one that had entranced me enough to propose to its owner after knowing her for less than a year. But now I glimpsed traces of that other Ursula lurking behind her beautiful face.
“Laughing,” I said, slowly. “Laughing … at you?”
“Right,” she said. Then, unbelievably, she pouted and her voice became the whine of a petulant toddler. “You really really hurt my feelings.”
I bit it all back, everything I might have said about how crazy all of this was, how I was innocent. But … was I? I wasn’t sure anymore. So I swallowed it. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to get in the car, drive to the nearest airport and book a flight back to L.A.
“I’m sorry.”
The light from the setting sun glowed against the red-brown skin of her bare shoulders, the long curve of her neck. She seemed to shimmer in that dwindling light.
Remember what is true, I thought. Where had I heard that before? It seemed important. Remember what is true.
Ursula’s eyes were dead as ashes. “You’re sorry … what?” she said.
“I’m … sorry, Ursula.”
“Thank you,” she said. “See how easy that was? Now we can keep it moving.”
Standing before you now, friends, it’s easy to tell myself that was the moment, the surest harbinger of the horrors to come: the moment I should have done a thousand other things. Instead, I got into the car and drove to San Francisco.
When we arrived at the hotel, I checked my voicemail and got horrific news from my agent: Vanessa Warcloud, the actress who had starred in the first three Spectre & Sparrow films, was dead, murdered by her ex-husband.
After the punishment I’d taken from Ursula, this news was too much to bear. Vanessa and I had become friends during the filming of Spectre & Company. She was a passionate advocate for the rights of indigenous women. She’d been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her performance as Artemis Spectre, the first Native American woman to attain that recognition.
That night, as if to seal an unspoken bargain, Ursula and I made love. Beneath her gentle hands and whispered promises, I put my concerns about her violence, and the murder of Vanessa Warcloud in a tiny room inside my mind.
Then I turned out the light and locked the door.
Apart from her regular Sunday sermons at the L.A. ministry, Ursula and I were constantly on the road: touring, making local talk show and radio appearances. With my tutoring she’d begun writing. She’d taken to storytelling like a natural. Of course she was accustomed to writing her sermons, but revealing her “authentic self” to her rapidly growing public through “dramatic” writing excited her.
We never spoke about the violence; or how she would vanish when the pressure became too great, so that the other Ursula could emerge. I was her only target and thus the sole witness to the phenomenon. Five years after the honeymoon incident I’d learned to grin and bear it. I loved her. She was complicated. She needed help.
I was eager to support Ursula’s dream of becoming the first black woman to lead an international ministry; proud to step away from the modest spotlight I’d earned writing science fiction.
In the years following the publication of the Spectre & Sparrow books, the inspiration that had once sustained my creative output seemed to abandon me, swept aside by the urgency of Ursula’s rise. I was happy to serve as her ghostwriter. She loved my input, and it did make her writing better. I helped her buff her own shine until it burned.
By our seventh year, Ursula was a national celebrity, speaking at universities and even dining at the White House, all without me. She claimed that my presence distracted her; that she constantly worried about my safety. I learned to embrace solitude and work “behind the scenes.”
“Behind every great prophet there’s always a great acolyte,” she told me, during her phone call from the Lincoln Bedroom. She’d then gone on to enjoy her dinner with the President and his family.
Whenever we were in public, members of her “flock” would accost us, begging her attention, demanding her prayers. Meanwhile, at home, the beatings grew more frequent, and more severe. I doubled down on my commitment to understanding her. I’d come to believe my inability to “figure it out” was the cause of her frustration. I learned to hide the occasional black eye behind sunglasses and conceal the odd busted lip with theatrical makeup. I learned to keep it moving.
On the Sunday morning Ursula was officially recognized as a “Bishop” of our denomination, she was no longer the charming woman I met outside Cedars Sinai ten years earlier.
She’d grown austere, smiling only when she was in public. On those occasions she could generate enough star power to charm arenas filled with her people, her passion projected from the giant television monitors we’d installed so that her image could be broadcast far and wide.
She never smiled when we were alone, as if being with me had drained her of joy. It had certainly extinguished her desire for sex.
Her personal habits had changed as well. Over the years, she’d shifted the focus of her workouts from aerobics to strength training. After an especially heavy workout, she might actually bathe. Otherwise she might skip showering for a week, preferring to wait until Sunday morning to bathe for her sermons.
She’d taken to bringing home sacks of fast food after church. On those occasions, she’d rush into her home office and lock the door, refusing to be interrupted under threat of violence.
It was during that Sunday sermon, the Sunday I came to think of as The Day of The Bishops, that I noticed something unusual was happening to Ursula. She was onstage before a packed auditorium, and she seemed to be struggling to read.
I’d written the sermon, and cribbed its climactic final beats from Psalm 23, Verse Four: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
It was a popular passage of scripture; one Ursula had quoted hundreds of times. But as I watched her, she lost her place and began to mumble. I sat up straighter in my seat as she began to “ad lib” scripture.
“… for thine is the kingdom, I shall not want,” she muttered. “When the rockets red glare, on Earth as it is in … ahhhh.”
Looking up at Ursula’s amplified face I saw her turn beet red. Her normally straightened hair had grown frazzled and plastered to her skull like a halo of black corkscrews bouncing around her head.
“I’m sorry, my dearly beloved,” she grunted into the microphones. She wiped at her brow with the handkerchief I always put in the pocket of her robe. “Y’all know the work of Christ sometimes makes fools of even His brightest prophets.”
The congregation laughed. When Ursula lowered her head, humbled by their approbation, the applause was thunderous. “We love you, reverend! “Go on and preach!”
Ursula was crying, mopping at her forehead and jowls with the soaking handkerchief. Then, with a grateful grin, she pointed to the ceiling, indicating that God was present.
“Thank you, beloved. What do I always say, when the Enemy tries to bring us down?”
The congregation, well trained by now, responded with Ursula’s personal mantra. “Keep it movin’!”
Ursula picked up where she’d faltered. But this time she directed most of the sermon in my direction. She kept it moving.
But I dreaded what she might do when we got home.
When we met she’d weighed one hundred- sixty pounds, a healthy weight for an active woman who stood six-feet-seven inches tall. Ten years later, she weighed more than three-hundred pounds.
But I was telling you about the bishops.
It was customary for leaders in our denomination to welcome their new colleague with a brunch, usually held at the new bishop’s home church. I’d arranged for the brunch to be held in one of the church’s large meeting rooms where the eleven or so bishops in attendance could mingle with a few dozen congregants.
Many of them had travelled to L.A. from all over the country to celebrate Ursula’s ascendancy in the church hierarchy. The bishops were welcoming and full of praise. There were speeches honoring Ursula’s service, and endless praise for the ever-expanding popularity of Home for The Heart Ministries. Ursula should have been happy.
But the Reverend Doctor looked lost, like an anxious child surrounded by adult strangers. She appeared distracted, her answers lifeless, as if recited by rote. After one of the invited bishops performed the benediction, we all sat down to eat.
It was while Ursula was demolishing her third helping of eggs, bacon, sausage, and fried potatoes that I suddenly understood what I was seeing.
Between the debacle of her bungled sermon and the celebratory brunch, that other Ursula had taken control. Now she was wolfing down her food, her face practically buried in her plate. She nodded at comments, paused to pray by request, and pretended to listen when spoken to. I even spotted several of her colleagues eying her, curious at her rapaciousness. I watched her make excuses between helpings.
But she never stopped eating.
I sensed the storm brewing, in the way she continuously gnawed at her lower lip. I saw disaster in the way she compulsively rubbed her palms against her thighs, kneading her flesh like cold clay in an attempt to contain that secret fury.
Calamity in the flex and clench of her fists.
Ursula was seated behind her big cherry wood desk when I walked into our home office. She was using her favorite letter opener to unseal envelopes containing best wishes, personal checks or cash. The donations and prayer requests were mostly from elderly congregants who still used snail mail.
The sterling silver letter opener was a gift. A visiting pastor had presented it to Ursula on the occasion of her fortieth birthday. The long stiletto blade glinted in her hands, tossing argent flickers in the strangely harsh lighting of her office.
“You called?” I said.
“Dark in here,” she muttered, unsealing another envelope. “Need more light.”
Someone had removed the lampshades from her office. The big lamp on her desk and the smaller lamps scattered around the room were bare. Someone had also removed the recessed “cans” from the banks of overhead tract lighting. A dozen naked bulbs dangled from the ceiling like irradiated fruit.
I knew better than to ask why. Instead, I made a mental note to replace them in the morning.
“She called me yesterday,’ Ursula said.
“Who called?”
“Anya, dummy. Who d’ya think? She said she had a cancellation for her show on Friday. She wants to interview me.”
I was about to reply when Ursula leaned forward and began to poke the letter opener into the expensive wood of her desktop. She stabbed at the wood, gouging at it like a homicidal kid playing Whack-a-Mole.
“Ursula?” I said. “What are you doing?”
She ignored me, and thrust the letter opener into the desktop again, and again, faster and faster. Then she began dragging the blade back and forth in long arcs, creating a pitted hemisphere of slashes and gouged wood.
“William. Are you listening to me?”
“What?” I said, galvanized by the anger I heard in her voice. “Of course. Anya! My God, that’s fantastic!”
Anya Whitlock was a force of nature back then. The star of the immensely popular Anya Whitlock Show. She’d written bestselling books, acted in Academy Award winning movies, and produced everything from blockbuster television programming to her own line of heart-healthy diet products.
Anya was the richest woman in America, and it was widely believed that she could run for President (she’d successfully endorsed the last three) and win. She’d interviewed kings and killers to enormous ratings success. One appearance on her show guaranteed that, for fifty minutes, the whole world would be watching you.
“That’s amazing news,” I said. “It’s the break we’ve been waiting for! The chance to take H.H.M. worldwide! Did you say Friday? My God! We need to put together a list of topics she might want to cover and …”
Ursula slammed the letter opener into the desk. The blade penetrated the wood deeply enough to stand on its own: nearly a third of its length had sunk in.
“I simply can’t fathom how I ever got mixed up with you.” Ursula leaned forward and gripped the edge of the desk as if she were trying to gain enough purchase to flip it over. “You’re so. Fuckin.’ Stupid.”
“Ursula,” I said. She’d only struck me a few times in that last year. I’d avoided major conflicts, and the ministry had taken up so much of her attention she hadn’t had the energy to focus on me. I was determined to fly above the impending storm. “This is all good news.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. It’s a huge win.”
“You already said that.”
Ursula’s eyes narrowed to thin slits.
“So now you think you know what’s good for the ministry, right? You feel you know how to run things better than I do.”
“Ursula, I didn’t say that.”
Focus, I thought. You can fix this.
Then, a darker thought;
If you run, the Crusher will catch you.
The smell of French fries and pizza that had saturated her office for months seemed to enfold me in an invisible haze of fried lard and spoiled ketchup.
“It’s you,” Ursula said. “You’re what’s wrong.”
“Dammit, just stop!” I shouted, startling both of us. “You’ve got to stop.”
Ursula’s mouth hinged dropped open.
“Don’t you …”, she began. “How dare you …”
“Shut up, Ursula.”
“What? What did you just …”
“I said, SHUT. Up.”
Ursula was staring at me, her mouth open.
“Do you realize everything I’ve sacrificed up for you?” I growled. “Do you have any appreciation for how I’ve bent over backward trying to make you happy? To help you move this ministry forward?”
“I never asked you to …”
“Shut up!” I roared. “I’m not even religious! I don’t believe in God or Jesus or any of it! I’ve gone along with it all this time: ten years of you ignoring me, humiliating me. Ten years of obliterating my fucking identity. I walked away from my fucking career! I walked away from my life! For you!”
I was gasping, hyperventilating. And I couldn’t stop.
“Now you sit there on your ass trying to blame me? For what? Loving you? Wanting the best for you? Let me tell you something, lady: Without me backing you these last ten years, writing for you, crafting your infantile, cliché-ridden claptrap into actual adult speech, you’d be coaching basketball in some D3 college and working night shifts at the local Piggly Wiggly just to make the rent!”
Ursula’s eyes welled up. Then tears spilled down her cheeks. “Are you finished?”
“No I am not,” I snapped. “I’m going upstairs to cool off. After that I’ll be working on the next sermon. You are going to get out of this stinking office. Maybe you should go somewhere where you can think rationally about who has your best interests at heart.”
Ursula was staring at her desk, hands folded in front of her like the hands of a Catholic schoolgirl. A steady flow of tears splashed onto the desk.
“I’m not the enemy, Ursula. I’m your husband. And despite everything … all our … issues, I still love you. Maybe, after you calm down, you’ll remember what’s true, and what’s not.”
I left her there.
We hadn’t slept in the same bed for the last three years. Secretly, I’d come to appreciate the lull in our sex life. With Ursula it was easy to believe that I’d never been forceful enough to satisfy a woman of such ferocious appetites.
Even so, as I lay tossing and turning in the guest room I’d claimed for myself, a part of me still yearned for the time when she looked at me as a man, not as her assistant. But if I wasn’t “The Reverend Doctor’s Faithful Acolyte and Silent Partner,” who was I? Who had I become?
I dreaded whatever destiny lay ahead if I chose to stay. But I questioned whether I could ever leave her. I’d reshaped myself to fit into her world. Finally, there came the thought that had begun to pester me after the Rest Stop Incident …
Just end it. Kill yourself.
I’d been miserable for so long the seed that had been planted at that rest stop near San Francisco had grown into a redwood.
Just drive up to the San Pedro Bridge and jump. All it takes is one small step.
Below me, I could hear Ursula moving around in the office. She was muttering to herself again. I was troubled by the memory of Ursula’s tears; and the look in her eyes as she gouged that letter opener into the desktop.
“That desk was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship,” one of my voices said. “Hell of a way to blow off steam.”
But this voice was different.
“So,” the new voice said. “You’ve finally come to your senses.”
Someone was in my room.
I reached for the lamp beside my bed and turned it on.
Vanessa Warcloud was wearing the field uniform of the Utopian Cyborg Command: a one-piece spandex body suit and black leather duster trimmed with red piping along the sleeves. Small epaulets glittered like ruby lightning bolts at her shoulders. Red “grav-neg” boots” completed the ensemble. Her bionic eye scanned the room, throwing off iridescent red pulses.
“Vanessa,” I said, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat. “But … you died.”
“Hard to kill what’s already dead,” the woman said, the wry grin revealing her trademark black humor. “Name’s Artemis, by the way. Artemis Spectre.”
My visitor was indeed Artemis Spectre. But she was also Vanessa Warcloud’s interpretation of the character. Somehow, character and actress were one.
“This is crazy,” I said. “How can you be here?”
“Easy, cadet. You’re dreaming.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”
“She means to kill you, Singleton. But I’m thinking you already know that.”
I couldn’t answer. I was afraid of the answer.
“Hmmm,” Spectre said, in the exaggerated way Vanessa had done in the movies. “Question is: Are you ready to die?”
Spectre’s bionic left eye scanned my face. The movement of the techno-organic pupil trailed a lingering afterimage of red and silver motes.
“Too late for doubt, cadet,” she said. “You’ve hidden in the belly of the beast for so long you’ve forgotten how it feels to be alive.”
Her words hit me with the force of a slap. I knew those words.
“Vanessa,” I said. “I mean Artemis … I don’t understand.”
“Wake up, Will,” she said, and began to fade back into the shadows. “Time’s up.”
Then she was gone.
“Wait! Don’t leave me!”
Someone screamed.
Then searing agony exploded my world, a pain so big it flipped my mind inside out. Suddenly I was awake.
And I was burning.
Ursula squatted above me; her knees locked tight against both sides of my head. With her right hand she held me by the throat. With her left hand she was …
“God, That HURTS!”
… pressing the burning thing into my right cheek, my nose, and my eyebrow, pressing that scorching agony into my flesh. I smelled cooking meat and realized …
Burning
… It was me. The stink of burnt flesh, sickly sweet like roasting pork from the luau at the end of the world.
Ursula pulled the burning thing away. I tried to push her off but I was trapped, unable to move, to fight back. I could only scream,
“What did you do? What did you do?”
Ursula leaned down until we were practically nose-to-nose. For a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me. Instead, she placed her left hand over my mouth, muffling my screams.
“Shhhhh, darling,” she said. “We’re doin' just fine.”
She cocked her head, like an artist scrutinizing her work.
“That’s better,” she whispered. “Now Anya and everyone will know you’re mine. Forevermore.”
Too late to understand, little brother.
The pain in my face was monstrous. As if in mockery of my agony, the left side of Ursula’s face glowed red and yellow like the inside of a blast furnace. She was still holding whatever it was she’d used to burn me.
“What do you say we try a bigger one, baby?” she whispered. She reached behind her back, shifted her weight forward, and placed her hand on my testicles. “Here? Or maybe on the inner thigh?” she breathed into my ear. “How would you like …?“
I whipped my head to the right and sank my teeth into her right ear.
Ursula screamed, and dropped the burning thing.
As if observing from some higher dimension, I felt it land on the bed and bounce. Something hot struck my knee, and then Ursula’s scream became a roar of agony. I bit down harder and blood filled my mouth. Ursula was flailing, howling into my ear,
“… cocksucking muthafucking asshole … hurting me!”
She was hitting me with her fists, her knees. I freed my arms, wrapped them around her neck and pulled her closer to me. Pain-maddened, I burrowed my face against the side of her head and bit down harder, shaking my head back and forth until I felt her ear tear away from her. Ursula shrieked, and rolled off of me.
I whooped in a great rush of air and vomited up a mouthful of blood and Ursula’s severed ear. Flames were licking up the headboard, and a runner of flame smoked and crackled across the foot of the bed. A long dark object lay in the center of the flames, one end of it aglow like the eye of a vengeful god. Approximately two feet long, it was a thin black iron rod, about half the thickness of my forefinger. One end of the rod formed a circle to make a handle. The other end bent at a ninety -degree angle and split into in twin spikes.
A poker, I thought. A goddamn fireplace poker.
“You branded me,” I said. “You branded me!”
Ursula was blocking the doorway. Her white nightgown was covered with blood, but she seemed unaware of the damage she’d sustained. When she’d dropped the hot poker, it had bounced off her right shoulder and struck her back and buttocks. Burning strips of the white fabric she’d torn away still swirled around her like glowing cinders falling into ash.
“This is just what you wanted,” she said. “You know how much Anya means to my ministry and now look at what you did!”
“Let me out,” I said. “Get out of the way!”
Blood from Ursula’s severed ear was streaming onto her shoulder and down the front of her nightgown. From that other dimension, I felt the hairs on the back of my head crisping in the heat.
“Big fancy author. Always thought you were smarter than me, smarter than everybody. You just had to go and ruin everything!”
Then she charged me. I sidestepped, stuck my left foot out and tripped her. She crashed onto the burning bed and smashed it to the floor. Sparks flew as displaced air pushed the flames up the walls and across the ceiling.
I bolted out of that room, headed toward the winding stairway that led down to the front door. Smoke was pouring out of my bedroom now. The pain in my face was a demon, demanding my life as a sacrifice.
“We don’t even own a fireplace, you stupid cunt!”
I made it to the first landing—
Ten more steps.
—I was already anticipating the cool night air as it soothed my burns, when Ursula tackled me.
Entangled, burning, we tumbled down the stairs until the back of Ursula’s skull struck the marble floor. Most of her nightgown was gone, revealing pink, bubbling patches of scorched flesh along her left side. The left side of her face had melted beyond recognition. Her eye rolled in its socket and froze me with a look of naked hatred. “… Kill you,” she snarled. “… Kill you for what you did!”
This is true, some voice said. Her true face.
Using the floor for leverage, Ursula swung her lower leg up between my thighs and catapulted me over her head. I somersaulted, crash-landed on the marble floor and something in my pelvis snapped.
Get up, Will. Fight.
I raised my head and saw Ursula, towering, monstrous in the glow of the spreading flames. She took three steps toward me.
Move, asshole!
Then she collapsed.
I tried to stand, but my left leg wouldn’t move.
If that baby snaps, you’re gonna need surgery, pal!
Biting back a scream, I tried to roll up into a sitting position, but the blast of agony from my left side overruled the pain in my face and I nearly blacked out.
Keep it moving, Will, I thought. Gotta keep it movin’!
Ursula was on her belly, sniffing the air as if searching for some scent.
“I don’t need … eyes … to find yoooouuuu,” she croaked. “Jesus made you miiiine. Forevermore.”
Marshaling strength from some hellish reserve, Ursula began to pull herself along the floor. Her enormous strength left me no question as to which of us would eventually prove superior. She wriggled and thrashed, my beautiful deity reduced to a vast moving patchwork of scorched ruin.
In her right hand she held the black iron poker.
“Coming, baby,” she rasped. “Big mama’s … comin’.”
I began to scrabble backward, sliding my butt across the marble floor, pushing with my right leg while dragging my left. It was useless.
Just gotta make it to the office, I vowed.
The weird light from Ursula’s home office beckoned, ten, perhaps twelve steps down the main hall. I pulled myself along, adrenaline and fear driving me to move.
Just get to the office. Lock the door. Call the police.
“Sure,” Artemis Spectre whispered. “Every sentient being in the cosmos dreams. Why shouldn’t you?”
Ursula crawled toward me, while I dragged myself backward toward salvation. We were six feet apart.
And Ursula was closing the distance.
“Not strong enough, baby,” she grunted. She swiped at me with her right hand, and the tips of her fingers brushed the toe of my left shoe. “Never were strong enough to handle … magnificent … me.”
I kicked out with my right leg, air-pedaling, trying to break her nose or break her neck. Ursula surged forward, reached out and caught my right foot with one hand and twisted it. Hard. With the other hand she raised the poker and stabbed me. The iron barbs struck my right shin. They were too blunt to pierce flesh, but it hurt like Hell.
I pulled harder, fighting to free my right foot. Ursula was using both hands to twist my foot, but her hands, slick with blood, lost their grip on my shoe. I kicked down and my right heel struck her forehead. Another swing knocked the poker out of her hand. Then my right heel struck Ursula a solid blow across the temple and she dropped to the floor.
The hallway was silent, except for Ursula. She was snoring and choking at the same time. She lay facedown in that spreading puddle of blood, snorting, gagging, and snoring all at once.
Need to get help.
I dragged myself the last few miles.
After the fight in the dark entry hall, I was grateful for whatever weird tic had caused Ursula to remove all the lighting fixtures. That galaxy of naked bulbs blasted my eyes with white light, but at least I could see.
Fire alarms were blaring all over the house. And I heard the crackle and pop of burning wood. I crawl/dragged myself to the chair that sat in front of Ursula’s desk. Whatever had snapped in my pelvis had gone numb again by the time I reached the summit of that goddamn desk.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“Fire! My house is burning!”
“What is the address of your emergency, sir?”
“7636 La Crescenta Court. Hurry … my wife …”
Ursula snatched the heavy desktop phone out of my hands and smashed it over my head. Then she hoisted me off my feet and body-slammed me onto the desk.
Her face was a nightmare mask. A flap of burned skin dangled from her forehead, revealing a preternaturally white flash of bone. Both eyes had swollen shut.
“To-ge-ther,” she croaked. “Way- God meant us to … be.”
Then she began to strangle me. I clawed at her hands, dug my nails into the flesh of her wrists hoping to pry her fingers off my neck, but Ursula just squeezed harder. I reached out with my left hand, trying to grasp the heavy reading lamp. Instead, my fingers grazed the handle of the letter opener.
What happened next will only make sense after I’ve finished the main body of my tale. For now, I can tell you this much: when my fingers touched that silver handle I was galvanized.
A million watts of electricity raced up my arm like a bolt of silent lightning, and suddenly, I could see. It was as if I were standing in that other dimension and looking down into our three-dimensional space. I saw my life play out in front of me in instant, every love and hate, every joy and every grief. I watched my parents diminish beneath the weight of my sister’s death, and saw that same dwindling in my own soul. In an instant I was elevated beyond pain, beyond normal human perception. I was exalted, raised on high by a force unlike anything I’d ever imagined.
The power lit up my brain and set my soul ablaze. Perhaps it was the light of Creation, or pure consciousness. Whatever it was, when that power filled me up, I knew that I could push back Death itself.
I gripped the handle of that silver blade, and with the very last of my strength I drove the letter opener into Ursula’s left ear.
I can’t think of a better way to describe what happens when someone’s soul vacates her mortal body, other than to say that Ursula just … stopped. Then she fell on top of me and pinned me to the desk.
Laughter: Sometimes a sense of humor is all we have to push back the night, like “a light in the darkest places,” or a fireplace poker for a non-existent fireplace. So I laughed. I imagine that if any of you had heard me at that moment, my laughter would have sounded more like a dying man screaming at the innate unfairness of this world.
As the flames consumed the home we’d built together, I hugged my wife, and I wept and I laughed.
And I waited for whatever world came next.
What came next, you ask? Well, how about a homicide investigation for starters? The detectives suspected me, of course. The spouse is always the first suspect. But my story, however outlandish it may have sounded, connected all the right dots for them.
I spent weeks in the hospital, and underwent several painful surgeries. The scar? The twin “horns” that bracket my left eye and left this long trail of keloid scar tissue along my nose and cheek? I’m told, lo these five years later, that it looks like a lopsided horseshoe, or a U tilted to starboard.
On the day I was released from Cedars Sinai for what I hoped would be the last time, I was rolled out to the curb by the very same orderly who had rolled me out the night I met Ursula, ten years earlier.
“I like your scar, bro,” said the now middle-aged Oscar Quineros. “Like you got cuernos.”
“Cuernos?” I said.
“Yeah. Horns. From el bufalo. You feel me?”
Horns. From the buffalo.
Or “bison,” to be zoologically correct.
The house burned down. But not before fire and rescue teams pulled the two of us, still locked in that deathly embrace, out of the maelstrom. After a few hundred chest compressions they brought me back to life. For Ursula, they could do nothing.
I never learned where that other Ursula came from, or why she was the way she was. An only child, her parents had been swept away by Hurricane Katrina, never to be found. The most pedantic storyteller might suggest that she represented a part of me that needed to be confronted and defeated. I would offer a more nuanced interpretation and suggest that it was all just another example of weirdness in a life filled with weird shit.
As to what I saw the day I met Silver Woman and faced the dark beast that cast its shadow over that half-world? That’s the strangest part of all. I only fully remembered it after a detective returned my property, more than a year after he’d completed his investigation.
I was in my new apartment, sifting through those boxes of confiscated memories when I found the implement I’d used to end Ursula’s suffering, and, I suppose, my own. I’d taken it to the trash, meaning to throw it away, but some morbid curiosity stayed my hand. Instead, I tore open the envelope and examined it.
The blade was black with soot and encrusted with Ursula’s blood, but that wasn’t what stopped me cold. It was when I spied the model name, engraved on the handle in a decorative, looping script, clear as the clean waters of a fast-moving river: Tatanka.
The Silver Woman. Commander Artemis Spectre. Vanessa Warcloud. And now I could add another, forgotten name:
Tatanka.
Holding that bloodstained blade in my trembling hands, I remembered everything.
Standing on the riverbank with Silver Woman, I turned to face the force of nature that could cast a shadow big enough to darken the world. It was immense, with a shaggy coat and hot breath that smelled like a freshly uprooted vanilla cactus. It was a bison, you see, only far larger than any natural bison. It stood nearly twelve feet tall at the shoulders. The distance between its horns was greater than the span between my outstretched hands. And its coat was as white as fresh snowfall.
“He’s a friend,” Silver Woman said. ”More than a friend. He’s my brother.
Now we were sitting in front of a campfire. Night had fallen over the river and the full moon rode a path of silver clouds. Silver Woman was sitting on the other side of the fire, feeding the flames from a small pile of dried plants.
“We were worshipped in those times. But as the millennia passed, our powers grew weak, until we were the last, he and I. Our family, who once sang among the storm clouds and danced in the guts of the Earth, was nearly gone. One day, my brother lost hope. He walked into the river and let it carry his body away. That’s how I lost my beautiful Tatanka.”
Sitting before that fire I remembered my sister, my dear Frankie: how the pain of her passing left a void at the center of my family that could never be filled, and I cried for Silver Woman’s loss and for my own.
“When I saw your soul, it was so like Tatanka’s,” she said. “Back when we played together, flying between the spires and tumbling down the white waters. I thought he had only died to play a trick on me, so I wove myself a new body to join the game. But you couldn’t see me. That’s when I knew that Tatanka had lost himself. He’d forgotten what was true.”
Silver Woman laughed, her wind chime voice echoing among the dark canyons far above us.
“Even the gods can be surprised: Two souls somehow made one. You’re lucky, Will. Two souls means two families. I borrowed you from your human family just long enough to help you remember your other family.”
This river is our blood, she sang. This land is our body.
We were walking out of the foothills, moving toward the rising sun. I was warm, although naked and barefoot. Silver Woman held my hand and led me upward along a rocky path. Up ahead, outlined by the brightening dawn, sat the ranger station.
“One day,” Silver Woman said. “You will see my token and remember what is true.”
Then, she showed me an image of her token. Then she sent me back.
She must have been watching for him, waiting for centuries, listening for the echoes of his soul in the minds of tourists. And later, she’d been rewarded by whispers of his essence contained in the memories of people who read my books or watched the films.
I believe she checked up on me occasionally, “riding the souls” of people like Elizabeth Wiley, the woman who confused me for Ursula’s father.
“So beautiful,” Wiley had said at that rest stop. “And tall as a Utah Juniper tree!”
That day back in nineteen seventy-three our tour guides had shown us groves filled with tough, hardy trees indiginous to the Grand Canyon: white fir, and blue spruce and ponderosa pine. And Utah Juniper trees. Had Ursula sensed something about Elizabeth Wiley that spurred her to attack me?
I believe Silver Woman lent me the voice of Cyborg Commander Artemis Spectre; and that she somehow inspired the performance of Vanessa Warcloud.
When I saw the model name engraved on the handle of Ursula’s silver letter opener, the pieces of my shattered soul began to coalesce.
Tatanka. The Lakota word for bison.
That’s the part I was keeping back. Since my memories seem to jump back and forth in time, it figures that my story should too. But I think I’ve put everything in its proper place now.
I’m writing again, mostly under a number of pseudonyms. I don’t need fame and I’ve got enough money to keep me warm and dry for the foreseeable future. But so much of the Spectre & Sparrow books felt channeled through me, I’m still not sure how much of the story is exclusively mine.
All artists have a muse. Mine just happens to be a Native American nature goddess. She also keeps me from writing complete crap.
I researched them of course. References to certain Native American gods and spirits are replete through indigenous traditions and spoken histories from all over North America: Navajo stories of Changing Woman, or the Mikwok legends of Silver Fox. Other tales tell of powerful animal spirits, like the White Buffalo of the Sioux.
Or Tatanka: Sacred companion to White Buffalo Maiden.
Little Brother.
And so here I sit, scarred by love and healed by a mystery. That’s another one of my reasons for returning to the Canyon. In the hospital I promised Silver Woman that I would learn her stories and pass them on. She recruited me, after all. How better to honor my personal savior than to keep those stories alive for future generations?
Do I believe that I’m some kind of vessel for the reincarnated spirit of a Lakota buffalo god? I’ll leave that up to you, dear companions. After all, we live in crazy times, when a virus spread by a single cough can kill millions, where UFO’s grace the cover of the New York Times, and a black man can be President of the United States.
I’ll end, however, with this: My third, and most important reason, the reason I carry this silver token with me today. If you’ll look closely at the other side of the handle you can just make out, beneath the rust and soot, the name of the manufacturer. Look closely, and then tell me what you believe. See it?
Silver Sister. LLC.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll take this blade down into the depths of the Canyon and set up camp alongside the Colorado River. I’ll offer up some silent prayers to anybody who might be listening. I’ll pray for my own dear sister, and reflect on how the gods suffer loss just as we do. Then I’ll toss it into that fast-rushing current. After that, I’ll light a fire and wait. Who knows? Maybe my muse will appear and show me her truest face.
Maybe Frankie will show up.
I hope for that most of all.
Originally published in The Canterbury Nightmares (Crossroad Press, May 2023)
