The woman’s skirts begin to sag, billowing, falling down toward me, and I feel my sense of suffocation double, now it is like lying facedown in the mud while wet, mildewed mattresses are piled on top of me. I gasp and struggle to my feet, staring up at the woman on my ceiling. I grope blindly and my hand finds a paperweight on the end table, a lump of volcanic glass that Emily picked up on our honeymoon in Hawaii. It seems terribly heavy, but I am angry now, angry beneath the wet burlap suffocation, and I manage to lift the weight.
I hurl the chunk of rock at the woman on the ceiling. It hits her in the stomach and bounces off, landing on the coffee table with a crack. She squawks like a blackbird. Her skirts draw in quickly like windowshades snapping shut, and then she’s gone, nothing on my ceiling but abandoned spiderwebs.
I sit back down, the oppressive weight suddenly gone, making me feel impossibly light by comparison—as if I could float away, as if no one I loved had ever died, as if the sun were filling my veins. But that thrill leaches slowly away, returning to me to the grayness, the neutrality, that I’ve felt since Emily died.
I fall asleep, which is really only another flavor of oblivion.
* * *
I wake to find a man dressed in a threadbare black suit sitting on the edge of the hearth, cleaning his fingernails with a folding pocketknife. I immediately think of him as a preacher, as he resembles somewhat the country preacher of the small church my family attended when I was young, though he is clearly not the same man. He has black hair, a bit mussed, and a single heavy eyebrow that looks almost too hairy to be real. His face is middle-aged, hale and hearty, and when he looks up at me his eyes are blue and twinkling.
“Boo,” he says, softly.
“Who are you?” I demand, irritable from being just-awake, irritable at all these incomprehensible intrusions, all these distractions from the grayness of my first week without Emily, the first of who knows how many weeks I’ll be able to bear.
“I’m here to help,” he says, sounding sure and self-satisfied. “A couple of the girls told me there was something funny about you, that you could see them, so I came to investigate things personally. And here I am, and here you are, seeing me.” He stands up, folds his knife, taps it against his palm. He makes a peculiarly medieval sort of bow. “I’m the King of Grief, Gatekeeper of the Dead Places, and a Gambler of Bad Fortunes.”
I don’t know what to make of him. “Those women … ,” I say.
He waves his hand dismissively. “Just little goddesses, handmaids, field workers, don’t mind them. The one in the kitchen was the goddess of scents with sad associations, the one with the big black skirt was the goddess of heavy hearts. You don’t need to think about them. I’ve taken a personal interest in you, because of your … peculiar vision. You can see us, and that means you’re a special man, a man who deserves more than bad luck.”
I look at him blankly; it is as if I am observing all this through a pane of dirty glass, as if it is taking place inside an aquarium. Little gods of grief? Like Emily’s little gods of joy, of love? Is this the route my madness has taken, to make me inhabit a darker version of the world my wife imagined? How can this man be the King of Grief, with his threadbare suit, his greasy hair? Just looking at him, I know he has bad breath, and his teeth are crooked when he smiles. His eyes shine, but it seems to me that the shine is like that of oil on a rain puddle—full of rainbows, but ultimately foul. Still, who am I to question my own delusions, to question the face of a god?
He sits back down on the hearth and leans forward, elbows on knees, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Now then. What will you give me to get Emily back?”
I sit up straighter, as if I’ve been given an electric shock, and the grayness recedes, replaced by a furtive and desperate kind of hope. “What?” I say. “What do you mean?”
He looks annoyed, his single eyebrow bristling and drawing down. “A bargain,” he says, enunciating plainly. “You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you? A man goes into the underworld to fetch out his dead wife, a woman gathers the dismembered pieces of her lover and begs the gods to put him back together, it’s a classic tale, and here you are, in the middle of it. But it’s a bargain, and I need something in return, if you want Emily back.”
“Anything,” I say, not caring if this is a delusion, not caring if I’ve gone insane—better an insane world with Emily alive than a sane world without her. But of course that’s a contradiction in terms; no world in which my beautiful wife is dead can be called sane.
“Your left eye?” he asks, flicking open his pocketknife, showing me the shiny blade. He grins, and there are bits of gristle and meat stuck in his teeth. “That’s more or less what Odin gave up for wisdom—is your dead wife worth as much to you?”
I think of the knife, the blade, the pain that would come, my vision forever dimmed—but I’d have Emily. Would I give up an eye to look upon her again?
I don’t even question. If I’m insane, insane enough to see and hear this, then my mind is lost beyond redemption. But if it’s real, if this offer is real, how can I refuse it, how can I even risk a hesitation?
“Give me the knife,” I say, holding out my hand. “I’ll do it.”
He laughs heartily. “Good man! But you’re too eager, that’s no way to bargain. Your left eye is hardly anything, after all. Perhaps if you also sacrificed an ear. Van Gogh cut off his ear for a whore—is your wife worth as much flesh as a whore, hmm?”
I clench my fists, furious, and say, “Don’t toy with me. I’ll give anything for my wife. If you are who you say, you know that.”
“Oh, yes,” he says, voice suddenly like velvet, but even that image is rotten, and I imagine tattered red velvet eaten by moths. “I know. But would you give your life? Would you plunge this blade”—and suddenly the blade is longer, ten inches long, a foot, length sliding from the hilt like a cat’s claw from a paw—”into your eye, into your brain, knowing your death would bring your wife back to life?”
I hesitate. Death? By my own hand?
“I see,” he says, sounding satisfied, flipping the knife closed. “I thought you wouldn’t. I mean, just because you caused her death, that’s no reason for you to give up your own life.”
I tremble, but not from anger, from something different, more brittle, more sharp. “I didn’t,” I whisper. “The boy, the boy with the gun—”
“He just wanted money,” the man said. “But you had to shout at Emily, call the boy’s attention to her, startle her, startle him. If you’d just kept your mouth shut, she wouldn’t be dead. And yet you”—his contempt is total, I am as useless as the gristle caught in his teeth—”you won’t give up your life for hers.”
He is right. He is absolutely right. “Give me the knife,” I say. “And give Emily back to the world.”
“That’s my boy,” he says, and flips the knife over, and holds it out to me—
The sound of wings, battering at glass. Both of us look at the windows, and there are butterflies there. No, not butterflies, white moths. The man, the King of Grief, whimpers. “Shit,” he says.
I smell dust.
A woman glides into the room from the kitchen. She has olive skin and otherworldly, golden eyes. Her long dark hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she wears white pants and a white shirt; they could be silk pajamas. Her feet are bare. She looks at the man on the hearth. “You,” she says, and the disappointment in her voice is heavy and inescapable. The man cringes. “Get out of here,” she says.
“I was only doing my job,” he mutters, folding his knife.
“Away,” she says, and the command in her voice is the command of the mind moving a muscle—it cannot possibly be disobeyed.
The man looks at me, scowls, and then climbs headfirst up the chimney. A moment later his feet disappear from view.
I wonder who this woman can be, to reprimand the King of Grief, and I hate her for driving him away on the cusp of my absolution, my sacrifice for Emily’s salvation.