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  Other Edens

  OTHER EDENS All Rights Reserved ©2005 by Somtow Sucharitkul

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  DIPLODOCUS PRESS

  Los Angeles • Bangkok

  Main Office:

  48, Sukhumvit Soi 33, Bangkok 10110, Thailand

  ISBN 0-9771346-8-7 (hardcover) ISBN 0-9771346-0-1 (trade paperback) This book first appeared in a German translation as “Der Untergang von Eden” from Festa-Verlag, Germany.

  This is the first English-language edition. A trade paperback edition is also available, ISBN 0-9771346-0-1

  Further information about the author may be found at www.somtow.com

  Further information about Diplodocus Press may be found at www.diplodocuspress.com

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  Ingres’ Violin

  An introduction to Other Edens by S. P. Somtow

  by William Hjortsberg

  The French have a wonderful expression, le violon d’Ingres, to describe an artist possessing talent in more than one discipline. This bon mot arose from the virtuoso violin-playing of the great 19th century painter, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. (One of Ingres’ finest pencil portraits appropriately was of Paganini). Clinging tenaciously to a single gift, I regard the multi-talented with uncomprehending awe. S. P Somtow, the Thai-born writer of fantastic fiction, is a recent player on Ingres’ violin. Under his given name, Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul, he is the artistic director of the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bangkok Opera, as well as a distinguished composer. As S.P. Somtow, he has produced more than forty books, ranging from the gothic, Vampire Junction, to his semiautobiographical, Jasmine Nights. Along the way, Somtow earned nominations for many distinguished literary prizes, including the Hugo and Bram Stoker awards.

  In Other Edens, Somtow’s new collection of five stories, the Eton and Cambridge-educated writer fiddles up a varied medley of weird tales, each unique in tone and setting. “A Different Eden” recalls the work of Par Lagerqvist, who made such adroit use of the Christ legend in Barrabas and The Sibyl, as well as D. H Lawrence’s novella, “The Man Who Died,” in its astute observation of the human nature of Jesus. Somtow provides a glimpse, through the eyes of the Savior’s mother, of those mortal traits forever concealed by a presumed divinity.

  The second story, “A Lap Dance with the Lobster Lady,” jumps from philosophical fantasy to the ghastly comic-book world of Tales from the Crypt, where the sons of undertakers fall in love with freaks at seedy midnight carnivals and human organs replace automotive parts for macabre makeshift repair jobs. Later in the collection, Somtow acknowledges his debt to E. C. Comics. Like me, he was a fan back in the early 1950s of these imaginative short-lived publications where twenty-year-old geniuses like Wallace Wood and Jack Davis illustrated the bizarre tales of a young Ray Bradbury. Everyone exposed at puberty to E. C.’s brilliantly comic psychosexual graphic horror stories shares a common affinity for the darker netherworlds of fiction. If you like that sort of thing, you’ve got a date with the Lobster Lady.

  “Vanilla Blood” taps into the common underlying vein of sexuality running just beneath the surface of all vampire tales. In this story, Somtow doesn’t merely hint at the carnal aspects implicit in the lascivious bloodsucking popularized by such renowned nocturnal libertines as Dracula and Nosferatu, he revels orgiastically in their sanguinary passions. Told within the usually bloodless format of a courtroom transcript, the testimony of teenagers involved in a gruesome murder case burns with an erotic frenzy that might bring a blush to Anne Rice’s jaded literary cheeks.

  “Beloved Disciple,” another story dealing with vampirism, takes a novel and delightfully blasphemous approach to this familiar genre. Imagine Jesus in his youth befriending a vampire he takes for an angel at a Druid burning man sacrifice in Cornwall. Who cannot but envy such a wild conceit? Somtow’s vivid imagination leads the reader down some truly fantastic paths in this tale. The blood-sucking immortal instantly recognizes the profound spiritual nature of the Nazarene and when he meets him again, as a thirty-something preaching Messiah, becomes his reluctant disciple. What happens next is both shocking and hopefully profoundly troubling to anyone with a strict orthodox interpretation of Christianity. “Beloved Disciple” should be required reading for all the Bible-pounding fundamentalists presuming they alone know the truth.

  My favorite story in the collection is “The Bird Catcher,” which won a World Fantasy Award when first published. (It can also be found in The Museum of Horror, edited by Dennis Etchinson). This is not to say it is the best of the lot (such spurious comparisons are anathema to me) for I read them all with great pleasure. Yet, the masterful combination of a narrator recalling his youth, a sympathetic serial killer and an exotic locale drew me into the heart of the story like a violin cadenza seducing the listener, bringing new beauty to familiar forms. The skill with which Somtow evokes the perceptions of an eleven-year-old boy substantiates George Axelrod’s enthusiasm when he dubbed the Thai author the “J. D. Salinger of Siam.”

  Visitors to S. P. Somtow’s website will find a photo of him posing in the Bangkok Police Museum beside the mummified corpse of See Ui Sae Ung, the actual eater of children’s livers, “the boogie man of Thailand,” whom he wrote about in ”The Bird Catcher.” One can’t help but admire such wry gallows humor.

  Introductions at best should be brief as a handshake, a few quick words just as quickly forgotten to acquaint the reader with the storyteller making the true music. When he raises his baton for the downbeat, conductor Sucharitkul prepares to interpret the musical compositions of other artists, but when he sets pen to paper, S. P. Somtow holds the bow to Ingres’ violin. Listen closely, for you are about to be serenaded by a master.

  William Hjortsberg

  Lion Head Cabin, Montana

  A Different Eden

  * * *

  I am an old woman in Ephesus, sitting alone in a small house paid for by strangers. It is a small house, but it is real stone; I am an old woman, but they call me ageless; they call me mother to the world; they call me the daughter of the morning star; but I am just an old woman sitting alone in a small room, looking out over the alley, where the pilgrims jostle each other and are cheated by peddlers on their way to see the hundred-breasted goddess.

  Years ago, in Jerusalem, while the pain was still fresh, a man named Paul came to see me. He was starting a new religion. He needed my endorsement; for in his pantheon I was to become the mother of God. He had crafted a new theology of such grandeur and such outrageousness that he believed it would sweep the world.

  In vain, I told him true things about my childhood, and the birth of my son Joshua. I even broke terrible oaths of secrecy and revealed to him some of the mysteries that only women are allowed to know — I told him of the spring rites on the hillside, of the Roman centurion who might have embraced me in the guise of a horned god, of a secret flight to Egypt. But even this knowledge did not give him pause. He would keep telling me that the new religion was not one of literal truth, but of the truth concealed; that the truth he was fashioning was so much more true than this world of illusions we live in.

  “The earth from which my perfect man, my Adam, is fashioned,” he told me, “is a different dust; it’s today’s dust, you see, Hellenic and Roman and Judaean; my Adam will speak to people; I can sell him. I know about selling; I’ve sold tents.”

  I was not convinced. “My son was messiah of the month … and so were many others. He said many beautiful things. And now he has been dead a while, and the utterances have be
come the empty wind; some remember, some distort, some forget.”

  But Paul told me how he had seen my son in the clouds, in the lightning; my son would have been bemused at such an image of himself. I insisted that there was no magic here. Even then, I felt old, withered as the parched desert, drained of all feeling.

  “Somewhere,” Paul said, “there was magic.”

  “Where? Not in Nazareth, where they soon made mincemeat of my son’s fanciful tales of a superhuman father. Not in Alexandria, where we lived like dogs, always hiding, always insecure; not in Cornwall, not in Galilee, not in Jerusalem, where they nailed him to the tree of death.”

  “You’ve left out something, Miriam.”

  “Perhaps there was a place of magic,” I said, “but it wasn’t even in the real world … the real hard world we know … the Roman world. It was beyond. Far beyond. Outside the known world, anything can happen; there are no rules. But now, as you see, we are back on earth.”

  “But you’re wrong there. There’s no rigid wall between paradise and the flesh. There was once, but it’s leaking now. Anything is possible.”

  “It did not really happen. It was a dream.”

  “Who is to know that the world of dream is not reality, and reality but a shadow of the dream world?”

  “Sophistry. You’ve been living with Greeks too long. Even your Aramaic has a twang to it.”

  Then again, hadn’t my son lived with Greeks too long?

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  Why should it have surprised me? In Alexandria, we spoke Aramaic to my son; he answered us in Greek. Alexandria, a Greek city in an Egypt ruled by Rome, had its own kind of Jews; they considered themselves better than us. In Alexandria, even the Torah was in Greek, and those who sheltered us thought us uncouth for lapsing into the mother tongue. Joshua did not grow up with sights and sounds a proper Jew knew intimately: the screaming of a thousand lambs on holy days, the smell of their blood sluicing down the gutters of the Temple… the tramp of Roman boots on cobbled alleyways … the arhythmic thud-plop of a whore being stoned. We were always on the move, always being shown the door if we displeased someone; soon, I knew, we would run out of friends, or of friends of friends.

  It was Joshua who was the problem. Now, as I sit out my last days in Ephesus, I hear rumors about his childhood … they are writing what they call “infancy gospels,” fanciful anecdotes about his childhood. There’s a story about him being teased by other children, killing them and resurrecting them for a lark … breathing life into clay pigeons, too. And irritating a schoolmaster by knowing too much. There’s always a kernel of truth to the stories. For example —

  When we were staying at the house of Samuel the Mapmaker, a client of Joseph’s cousin the Arimathean, I came from the market to find Samuel’s son David pinned to the floor of the atrium, and my son pummeling him in the face. I ran to him, pulled him away, but he writhed and punched at the air. David was unconscious.

  “Let me go,” Joshua screamed. I couldn’t hold him even though he was just a child.

  “What’s wrong, what’s the matter?”

  “He told me my father’s a Roman with antlers,” he shouted. “He said I was spawned on a mountain top. He said that a demon raped you.”

  David lay motionless. And Joshua began to cry. Hysterically, appallingly. Then the doorway opened and I saw Samuel and my husband by the mezzuzah. And Joshua, just as abruptly, was dryeyed, unrepentant.

  David lay motionless on the mosaic stones, black and white, which spelled out words in Greek. Samuel ran to his son’s side. David did not speak, and he stared unblinking at the patch of open sky. A fountain whispered; caged birds trilled.

  “You’ve killed him,” Samuel said to my son.

  Joshua shook his head. “Not for long,” he said. Wild-eyed, he left my side and knelt down beside the boy. “You can quit fooling now,” he said. “Come back, come back from the dead.”

  Abruptly, David sat up. “You’re a freak,” he said softly. Pointed his finger in Joshua’s face. Joshua backed away. Held out his hand for mine. Not to ask for solace, but to steady himself.

  “Don’t tell lies about my father,” he said. His whisper hid an utter desolation, as though he were an angel cut off forever from the sight of God.

  “I think,” said Samuel, “that you people had better leave my house.”

  * * *

  The boy was unmanageable. He was unruly. He made no friends, and so he found imaginary ones; he would stand in an atrium, talking to the wind, and he also had a habit of talking to statues of gods — Egyptian, Greek, Syriac, it didn’t matter. If there was a shrine to Horus on a street corner, he’d strike up a conversation.

  One day, my husband beat him for speaking to Priapus. Joshua was quite passive, did not cry out; that angered my husband all the more.

  “There is only one god you are allowed to speak to, Joshua,” he said when he was done. “You will remember that now.”

  “I’d speak to him if I could,” Joshua said, “but he never shows his face to me. All the others do.”

  My husband wanted to go back to Judaea. “Look at your son,” he would say. “He’s gone pagan; half the time he runs around without any clothes on. When I teach him the Torah, he ignores me. One day he will have to become bar mitzvah, and I dread to think how he’s going to botch that. He needs to be with proper Jews.”

  “You’re consumed with guilt, Joseph, because you don’t love him.”

  Joseph could not answer that, for he knew I could see through his posturing.

  My son was only ten years old then; I told Joseph there was plenty of time. My husband was miserable in Alexandria, a severe man among hedonists, a learned man among dilettantes; and Joshua was heading toward trouble. There were gangs of idle youths in Alexandria. There were potent herbs to be smoked, wine to be drunk, and the Greeks believed that sex was little more than an itch to be scratched, which they did often, and with whatever person or creature was to hand.

  My husband was not a modern man; he wanted nothing better than a woman of quiet modesty and an obedient son; he had neither of those things. Joshua was sullen, always angry. I wanted to much to tell him how special he was to me, how special his birth was, how even our fugitive status was born from his special quality; but I could not.

  One night my husband and I argued until late. Joshua had not come home for supper. “I’m going to go look for him,” said Joseph, “and in the morning we’ll pack up, and leave for Nazareth.”

  “What about the danger?”

  “Danger? it’s been almost ten years.”

  “We shouldn’t go back,” I said. “Not unless there’s a sign, a messenger.”

  “Messengers don’t come to disobedient wives and wayward children,” said Joseph.

  “Only to the unbending, I suppose.”

  He raised his hand to me. I flinched. He stopped himself. He was not a cruel husband; I’ll give him that; among the devout, wives are whipped for far less than impertinence.

  “This is impossible,” he said. “It’s all wrong, everything is wrong. I’m a learned man among people who don’t want to learn. This son of yours is recalcitrant. And you’re not a dutiful wife.”

  It was an old argument. But that night I felt feistier than before; I wanted to argue back. “I’m as dutiful as can be expected,” I said.

  “Behind my back, you think of those women’s rites. And the goddess who is abomination, whose statue stares down at us everywhere in this city. And the horned man in the hills.” Which was a mystery of which no man should speak.

  “No one forced you to marry me.”

  “You’ve given me no children,” he said.

  “In this place, Joseph?” I said. “In time. When we’re home again, I’ll give you sons.”

  “It’s intolerable,” he said. “This alien place … being shunted from stranger to stranger … and never knowing where Joshua is, whether he’s talking to harlots o
r idol-worshippers or —”

  “I’ll find him,” I said.

  “In the night? Alone? A woman? In this iniquitous city?”

  “I’m strong, Joseph,” I reminded him. “Didn’t I bear a child, without a midwife, in a cave? Didn’t I walk with you to Egypt, with a child and our worldly possessions strapped to my back? If there’s iniquity out there, I think I can resist.”

  “There’s something that protects you. A demon, I think.” “Then my demon and I will go out into the street.”

  There was no demon. But there was a goddess.

  I pushed my husband aside and went to find my son. It was not hard; my son loved to consort with the lowly. If it wasn’t the alley of the lepers or the beggars’ corner, it would be the street of the harlots, which ran from a Temple of Venus all the way to the wharf, where the drunken sailors prowled.

  This was no Hellenic Aphrodite, coy and enigmatic, but the Babylonian Venus whom we call Ashtaroth, the earth that swallows up the sky’s seed and spits forth life. In Judaea, the men worshipped the father whose name cannot be spoken; the women safeguarded more ancient truths; those truths, I fear, will die now that the Jews are scattered. I did not fear the Goddess; I was not afraid to walk along that street. Even the men who strutted and preened there were afraid. They do not want to acknowledge that before Eve, the obedient, there was Lilith, the elemental.

  Joshua was a man-child who did not fear these women’s brazen sexuality, and had no need to cast it to the ground and conquer it.

  He was deep in conversation with one as I approached. They leaned against the temple walls, each one more painted than the next. The moonlight pierced the fronds of the date palms, and the women’s faces were criss-crossed with shadow. The air sweated attar of roses; insects buzzed; clouds of incense billowed from braziers between the paws of stone sphinxes.

  I couldn’t help eavesdropping. The one he was talking to was a little one, perhaps no older than I was that night of the hillside rites of spring. She was telling him how sore she was, how she had bled, the pain she was feeling, “as if,” she was saying, “I was a terracotta doll, broken, and no one knows how to mend me.”