Chapter 1: Rather Darkness Visible

Once upon a time I was an object of desire. But I am slipping.

My hand moves across the sheets. Fingertips trace the boundary of Felix’s body, starting at his shoulder, moving down his arm, slowing at his hip. He catches his breath, turns away and begins to emit a low rhythmic rumble. My hand makes a retreat, and I roll onto my back.

Staring at the ceiling, one by one, gossamer veils materialize in the darkness above me. They shimmer like the negative images of snowflakes as they waft down from the ceiling. All my life the veils have fallen unbidden from the void—they are shadowy harbingers of an impending shift in the lighting of the world. For after the veils and the sleepless nights comes the Beast that settles on my chest and spreads its enormous wings over me, blocking out the sun.

I am thirty-three years old, and I still believe in monsters and magic and the maddening crowd that rants and jostles in my head.

I’ve never liked talking about the veils or the coiled mass that lurks in the pit of my stomach on a beautiful day when everything is perfect and I want to die. The Beast is a divine corruption of my mortal mind. Like the veils, it arrives without fanfare, dousing the light in my eyes. It is in turns taunting, then ferocious, then bored like a god.

The Beast is a curse passed down through the complex couplings of chemicals and cellular impulses that misfire in my brain. It is my inheritance and no doubt my legacy, my shame and the truth about which I must lie.

I would be a villain if not for the fact that my deception protects my family. In doing so, I tread on a well-worn stage. Like me, my father tried to put on a good show. I am by far the better actor, but his final Beast-defying feat is a hard act to follow. There are vestiges of my father, both the man I loved and the shadow he was to become, in the hollows of my cheeks and the purging of my smiles. In the end, he lost it all. And me?

I would be nothing without the Beast. It is the slant if not the reason to my world. And because I refuse to call it by its true name, the Beast has taught me the mythic, shape-shifting power of words. Each day I must invent a new name, a new dialect, a new excuse to move the narrative forward.

On my lips language becomes pliant and subversive. There are layers of meaning to separate what I say from what I do from what I feel. When I cannot pronounce the truth, I stutter its approximation. Thus is my mythology born.

To hear me tell it, I am part Madonna, part Medusa, part Medea, part Magdalene. In reality, my life is ordinary to the point of privilege. My misfortune is I cannot live like this. For how can I look on the bright side when the Beast stands between me and the sun?

Like two sides of a moon, I am both Anna and the not-Anna, the pawn of deities and demons as I wax and wane between cycles of temptation and obedience. Synaptic sirens seduce me to the edge of reason. I often linger under the gaze of a witch who lives in the mirror and whose cold touch turns my skin to glass. I trace God’s single, all-knowing eye, milky and inconstant, as it sweeps across the sky, and his indifference turns my dreams to dust.

I flip my pillow over and twist and turn in my winding sheet as I wait like Lazarus to rise from the dead between sunrises. I strain to fall in step with Felix’s breathing. How can he understand my terror of the veils? He loves the darkness—it is only that for him.

I know the darkness is crowded with vagrant, unformed shadows waiting for the contrast of light to be born. Surely daylight will expose islands of lucidity, the long lost Ithaca of my soul.