The Vorrh

screen. He tugged his moustache and Max did the same. Then Max pointed at the open wound in his arm, deeply vented and bloodless. He had died nine years before, at the height of his fame, in another grand hotel, his wife cutting first, his hand gripping hers on the razor. This was a very different mirror dance. The Frenchman nodded and averted his eyes as Max stiffened back into him and glass. He knew he had exhausted his imagination, his wealth and his libido. He knew he had lost a precious gift, but did not know what it had been. He knew he had once been Raymond Roussel. He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger, and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.

‘The eyes have fallen into disuse in their method
of stringing them. Nor is the notch frontally in
the middle ends of the bow.’
Leo Frobenius,
The Bow, Atlantis,
The Voice of Africa. Vol. 1
    The bow I carry with me into the wilderness, I made of Este.
    She died just before dawn, ten days ago. She had seen her death while working in her garden, saw the places between plants where she no longer stood, an uncapping of momentum in the afternoon sun. She prepared me for what had to be done, walking back into our simple house and removing her straw hat, returning it to its shadow and nail on the north wall.
    She was born a seer and some part of her seeing lived in the expectancy of her departure, a breeze before a wave, before a storm. Seers die in a threefold lapse, from the outside in. The details and confinement of each infolding had to be carefully marked and heard without panic or emotion on my part, for I then took on a different role.
    We said goodbye during the days leading to her night. Then all of my feelings were put away; there were more important rituals to perform. All this I knew. From our first agreement to be together it had been described, it had been unfolded. Our love and companionship grew in the confines and the constantly open door of its demand, and secretly I rehearsed my distance and practised the deceit of loneliness.
    As I stood before our solid wooden table with her blood drying stiff on my skin, her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart, and I could still hear her words. The calm instruction of my task repeated over and over again, embedded with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness and its fence of doubt. The entire room was covered in blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic and kind.
    She had explained all this to me while I served her breakfast on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles, vivid in innocence at every direct glance. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide and agree with the rain, while my fear ignited them into petrol wires of ferocious anger, stuffed into my oxygenless, hidden core.
    I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax she had cut from the garden. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. I removed her unused womb and placed her dismembered hands inside it, sealing the misshapen ball which sometimes moved a little in its settling. I shaved her head and removed her tongue and eyes, and folded them inside her heart. My tasks finished, I placed the nameless objects on the wooden draining board of the sink. They sat in mute splendour, glowing in their strangeness, untouched by any criminal light. What remained on the table and floor was simply waste. I left it for the wild dogs when I departed that place with all its doors and windows open. For three days I lived with the inventions of her and the unused scraps, the air scented by her presence, the musk-deep smell of her oil and movement. The pile of her thick, unwashed hair seemed to breathe and swell against the bars of sunlight that turned the room towards evening. These known parts of her stroked away the