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Andromeda Bound by Judy Seicho Fleischman Thus it always is with winged horses, and with all such wild and solitary creatures. If you can catch and overcome them, it is the surest way to win their love. Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys Lately it felt like cancer had her rather than the other way around . The last thing Annie wanted to tell her child, just now blossoming into womanhood, was that she, her mother, was dying. But Annie had held this off for too long already and her young daughter was anxious, sensing things were more serious than either of them had thought. It seemed so unfair. "Annie, its metastasized and there's nothing to be done. Make your plans in the here and now. Don't wait for tomorrow," the doctor said, matter of factly. "What matters?" She heard the words reverberate in her skull. The prognosis felt cold to the touch, in sharp contrast to the warmth of the teahouse. The serene surroundings offered her refuge from the storm of emotion, which too often consumed her, and provided a container large enough to hold a deep sorrow which manifested as a symphony of sensation inside her. The sound of water cascading down stones on the fountain dripped in her ears as hot, red-brown liquid flowed down her body, helping to ease the pounding in her head and the tight clenching in her chest, making it easier to breathe. As the tea flowed within, she imagined it as the fire of Athena's wisdom penetrating mortal form, melting a frozen space, this hearth that once pulsed with life to the beat of an ancient rhythm, this hearth whose flame had long ago been extinguished. It hadn't been menopause or cancer that had done it. Something in Annie had simply shut down, unable to cope. She thought it ironic. Cancer cells grow, the body falls apart, dying. Whose life is up for grabs now? Who deserves to live? Who was she in all this living and dying of the body? Here I stand, daughter of mortal man, king though he may be, chained to this ghastly rock, gorgeous chunk of the Great Earth Mother. Ceres, merciful Mother, I beseech you. Athena, you know what it is like to be alone. Dear Goddess, save me, come through me. Fill this tear-stained form with strength, with purpose. Feel so faint. My head is spinning, my whole body, or is it the world spinning around me? Hold on. Hold on. * * * Fragments of memory surfaced as shifting silhouettes and mingled with mythological images in Annie's mind, no longer bound together as a linear progression of events which she had, until now, identified as her life's flow. She adored the ancient Greek myths. Growing up in a family filled with so much pain and mistrust, the realm of Olympus offered an alternative view, a universe full of wonder and mystery where Gods and Goddesses were quite real, and, mortal as she was, she could embrace the divine, the sensual, the beauty of love and life. This was not so much a space in which to escape as it was to play. She could still visualize that first time. They slept in loft beds, she and her sisters. Instead of a bottom bunk, each had her own private domain consisting of a desk, chair, shelves, and a little open space. The first thing she did when they moved in was to paste the collection of stars, galaxies, and nebulae on the ceiling directly above her so that the last thing she'd see before falling asleep was the vastness of this glowing, magical playground. Sometimes she could feel herself floating in that sky, as if the ceiling was actually a doorway to the vastness of Space which she could open simply by recognizing it as such, a mystical telescope dome powered by an inner vision. She imagined herself as a goddess, dressing up in long scarves and jewelry, borrowed from her mother. She'd climb up the ladder and ascend to this place, her bed, where no one could see what she was doing. She'd slowly slide the scarves between her legs, feeling the soft slipperiness of the silk triggering an ancient instinct within her. Young as she was, she recognized the translucent, sticky stuff surfacing from the cavernous underworld that lay beneath the layers of silk. She felt the rhythm beginning to take shape. Her hands moved instinctively to the beat, gliding gently down the body to the source of heat building within her. Hand moved against hand, working in unison to feed the flame, this glorious girlish desire coming to life. * * * Annie's mind drifted willingly to distract her from her current surroundings, an all too real hospital room with pale yellow walls, monitoring equipment, and a tiny closet in the corner to hold what few possessions one would choose to bring to a place like this. Her daughter had tried her best to decorate the place, hoping to brighten it up, but there was only so much she could do. Nothing seemed to relieve Annie's sense of distress. Annie felt as barren as the room. The chemo had caused her to lose her physical beauty, a once wild mane of brown curls. She had grown tired. Tired of waiting. Waiting for the pain to stop, waiting for the constant stream of concerned family and friends to stop, waiting for all her hopes of an alternative to the certainty unfolding before her eyes to stop. To just stop. To just be. Just engage the rawness of it all. All she wanted right now was to be alone. How could you forsake me to this horrid isolation, father? You called me faithful. Is this what it takes to be faithful? Feels like drowning to be so close to water without being able to move. I hear the ocean's roar, so close it licks my toes sometimes, teasing me back to life just when I'm ready to give up. Whose life was it? Annie felt more connected to the cancer cells, the very things destroying it. At least she could understand their naked urge for survival. At least they were going with the flow. She recognized fear lurking beneath the surface of this well of anger. It was safer to feel the fear than to face what lay beneath it, a desperate sense of despondency coupled with profound regret and resignation. She tired of this pattern. When had she given up on life? When had she forgotten to remember its joys as well as its sorrows, its simple beauty? She sensed a presence in the room, gently tapping on the door of her awareness, scratching her inside, somewhere just slightly out of reach, reminding her of the tale of Perseus and the three Gray women who shared a single, common eye. She imagined the sisters struggling in their shared blindness to find the eye that he snatched from them. They had no choice but to surrender. Taking her cue from the ancient tale, she released into the familiar sensation of tightness in her chest, allowing the breath to flow down to her belly, and noticed an unmistakable aroma drifting through the air, filling it with luscious sweetness. The smell lingered. She could almost see it, as if this mysterious presence were painting a trail of color to match the flow of scent. Roses. Her mother's favorite. She could taste the sweetness as she inhaled deeply. It drew her to a time when she still believed in magic, in mystery, in the possibility of perfect love. As a young girl, she'd imagine herself as the chained princess Andromeda. Along would come Perseus, a rescuer of circumstance, who understood her at first sight. Using trickery and great determination to overcome obstacles, he risked his life to save her. Annie imagined him swooping down, riding the winged horse, Pegasus, and transporting them into the sky where they could survey the realm of mortals atop Mount Olympus, ultiimately resting beside one another in that magical garden of eternal delight. Her mother said that Annie was obsessed with death but the girl couldn't imagine a place lovelier than the Elysian Fields. * * * Yielding to the sensation of the IV fluid dripping in her vein, Annie's mind shifted once more. She had been on her way home from middle school. He had asked her to help him fix his car. The sight of a stranger so close to her apartment building confused her but not enough to give her any cause for concern. She stepped inside the vehicle when the reflection off the edge of the knife's blade set her heart racing. "Get in, and don't look at me. " He told her not to tell anyone. He said he'd kill her if she did. But he didn't do much. He didn't even take off her clothes. He just touched her there, through the layers of cloth. He made her touch him. His divine form was not sheltered. It felt slippery in her young hands. He told her to move faster. He slid his hand against hers to show her the rhythm. Then he moved his hand to her secret place and slid against it with a slower, gentler rhythm. She didn't react. She took it in instinctively, moment by moment. She remembered feeling calm, or was it numb? No, something else. As he touched her and she touched him, she became curious about the shapes and the rhythms. She felt that stirring inside. Only later did she ask herself how she could have felt something gentle in the midst of danger. She was trapped. The car was moving. He was driving. It happened so fast, and so slow. Then she was standing on the cold hard pavement, lost although only a few blocks from home. She remembered feeling sad for him, sad with him; as if she could feel his pain, his sorrow, his heart's hidden longings, could feel them as real as her own; as if in the midst of the brutal drama, there was a point of contact, where villain and victim merged. Afterwards, though gripped by terror, she was never able to hate him. There had been a profound tenderness to the encounter, but as she walked home, unsure of what she would say, she felt a great weight descending. After all, he had said he would kill her. Should she protect herself and not tell them? How could she explain the softness, the fire awakened within her during the encounter? It felt like confessing a sin. She felt a great shame and repulsion, no longer free to feel the purity of that flow of life energy. And there was no one to whom she could explain this. She was twelve years old and utterly alone. Day breaks. My heart aches. How long have I been trapped out here? Time passes so strangely. A minute turns into an hour, or is it the other way around? No way to tell precisely. I try to watch the sun's ascent and descent as the day goes by, but soon I grow tired and drift off into a half-sleep. When I come to, I never can remember which way time is moving. You'd think that, being in one place for days on end, one would have a fixed reference point, something certain, something solid. But it's all quite slippery, and the only certainty rests in the rhythm itself, a pulse which echoes in my head and heart, blood churning within, its flow as slow and as inevitable as the tides etching of this rock, this body. Skin turns to leather. All the elements conspire against me. And yet I'm still alive. Why? Feel the salty moisture of tears blending with ocean mist, falling on sun stroked lips, so parched that this liquid feels soothing though I know it stings so intensely, seeping through the cracks of flesh down to the nerve, through every vestige of form that is my being. But there's something to this sensation, like a gentle breeze, flowing over the old layers of flesh, helping them to flake away. Pain was the great separator and the great bonder in her family. Her mother had been eating her own pain for years, literally, having gained most of the weight early on in the marriage. She would fall into extremes of behavior, alternating exuberant expressions of praise and pride in her children with fearful fits of rage and blame directed inward and outward. Her mother was consumed with Annie's beauty, noting with a tinge of bitterness that the girl was a reflection of her in younger and slimmer days, giving Annie the impression that she was deeply unhappy in her own body. They shared a love of drama, of poetry and passion -- the beautiful things in life. Poor as they were, AnnieÕs mother was remarkably resourceful in expanding the cultural horizons of her children. She encouraged Annie to study ballet, noting the child's love of dance at an early age. They would go to matinee performances. The girl loved the final scene in Swan Lake, when the white swan dies of a broken heart. She would perform it for the whole family, making up the steps each time, trying her best not to crash into anything in their small living room. Annie adored the Museum of Modern Art and would spend hours sitting in front of Picasso's Guernica, with its horrifically haunting depiction of his country's civil war. She would draw it, tracing it in her mind. There was something about that painting that struck a chord in her. Both she and her mother loved to sing but little Annie felt intimidated and muted in her mother's presence. Her mother sang loudly and off key, as if she couldn't hear herself. She greatly appreciated and loved life's beauty and yet, something in her remained desperately unsatisfied so she sought to satisfy the hunger through her children. Annie's father was diagnosed as bipolar when she was a child, although his patterns emerged long before the diagnosis. He fell into long periods of deep depression punctuated by short bursts of intense, brilliant expressions of elation. His mind was expansive and exacting, suiting his own passions: physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Annie loved it when he would sit down with her and explain the mysteries of the Universe, especially relativity. He loved the language of physics and shared with her the extraordinary beauty of mathematics, with its lovely shapes which could sum up complex ideas so simply. He would explain to her why Newton invented calculus and how linear algebra described a reality beyond ordinary conception. He expressed his love in those dialects but if she tried too hard to understand his vocabulary, it was easy to get lost, especially when he became entranced by his own perspective. She would get bored. Then angry, thinking he didn't care enough to speak her language. But in the times when Annie's mind met his, she knew that he was a great man, and could feel herself ascending with him to that special space of wild vision and mystery. But he always tumbled back down hard, and, she with him, leaving them both on shaky ground. His suicide attempts were frequent although her mother used to joke that if anyone could try to kill himself without doing any physical harm, he could. Like the time he stabbed himself in the chest and was saved by the eyeglass case stored conveniently in his breast pocket. Her parents didn't know how to communicate with each other except through a common and passionate language of pain. Their violent fights brought them into their bodies, but not without a price. Even in the rare silent spaces that preceded and followed the raging firestorm of their desperate and despairing battles, Annie remained unable to fully trust either parent. Something in her had been sacrificed, locked away, all the available space in her heart taken up by pain. She longed for release, longed for peace, longed to wrap her arms around the whole of it, and cry for all of them. Her sisters had each other, twins like Castor and Pollux, protective and ever watchful for the rising storms. Little Annie felt lost and alone, often enraged, cast adrift as she was in this sea of sorrow. She and her sisters bore witness to the great tragedy, acting out their roles dutifully as they took on the legacy of pain, carrying it forward in time, unable to see a way out. Caught between the worlds. One which birthed and nurtured me within its walls. That awesome palace seems so near, sometimes I feel transported there, floating above its carefully tended, flower-scented garden pathways; I hear the buzzing as each blossom surrenders its powdery essence and transforms into sweet nectar in a blissful dance feeding that great sound which penetrates without stinging. I hear it so loudly, so clearly. But childhood ultimately yields itself to time. And now this ocean world beckons, feeding the flow of my consciousness with a new sound just as ancient, just as real. Except that these gentle waves turn quite suddenly into a furious, howling frenzy, so fierce and free that it's all I can do to hang on as the wave crashes over me. Annie's eyes wandered around the stark room and stopped suddenly, caught off guard by the display of glow-in-the-dark stars pasted up on the ceiling. She noted the fluorescent lights and smiled, recognizing her daughter's gesture, then reached over to the bedside remote, turned out the light and gazed upwards. She felt transported to those days when she, despite everything, remained a star struck, city kid, gazing up at the night sky projected on the planetarium dome. A sense of awe passed through her consciousness as she sunk deeper into the experience, until she could see the wondrously monstrous Zeiss projector dancing around in the center of the planetarium, creating a Universe of light to fill the darkened screen of sky as the announcer pointed out the Milky Way. She could see them now, the constellations that pointed the way to the one spot on the sky that never moved, the pole star, Polaris. There were three constellations in all -- the Big Dipper, of course; Cepheus, shaped like a tilted house, and Cassiopeia, which looked like an upside down W. She recognized the blur of light next to Cassiopeia as her own galaxy's nearest neighbor, the lovely Andromeda. The hospital room began to recede as Annie's consciousness experienced her adult body lying on the bed while her child body sat riveted to the planetarium chair. Something which she perceived to be herself and other than the two bodies below her, ascended through the ceiling, then the roof. Something was pulling her skyward. The announcer's arrow of light pranced across the sky from one constellation to the next as each was overlaid with a drawing of the mythical creature to which it was attributed. The ancient Greeks considered the heavens a sacred realm, populated by immortals and, occasionally, by their all-too-mortal subjects. Cepheus was a great king who married Cassiopeia and fathered Andromeda, this much she knew. The announcer's voice grew more foreboding as he related the tale. " . . But the mighty Poseidon demanded that the king sacrifice his only daughter. . ." The crowd of city kids, so used to life as drama, had no trouble believing the story. The details surfaced and reassembled in Annie's mind. Cassiopeia had angered the lord of the Seas with her extreme behavior, claiming that her daughter's beauty surpassed that of His immortal nymphs. For many days and nights Andromeda stood chained to a rock until finally Perseus, carrying the bloody head of the Gorgon Medusa, and riding the winged horse, Pegasus, swooped down to rescue her just as a ferocious sea monster was rising up to devour her. Little Annie admired the graceful, bold motion of Pegasus, this magnificent winged creature, created from the blood of the mighty Medusa when she was slain by Perseus. Medusa was the only Gorgon he could kill, the only mortal of the three sisters. Athena had given Perseus Her own shield to reflect Medusa's deadly glare. The announcer continued,"Perseus loved Andromeda at first sight." Annie knew that Perseus had urged the princess to speak, to tell him her name and place of origin but she dared not. Ultimately sensing his devotion and her own love for him, she finally relented. The announcer finished the tale, "As the monster approached, Perseus held up the head of Medusa, turning the monster to stone as it gazed upon the Gorgon." Little Annie wondered who would rescue her. Who would tame the monster within her, this fearsome rage and terror that gripped her as sleep drew near each night? If only she could rescue herself. If only she had wings, she would fly as high as the wind would carry her and weep and wail with all her might. Little Annie's thoughts were interrupted as she began to feel a churning, oozing warmth between her legs. She quietly left the darkened theater, and made it as far as the water fountain before she let out a deep moan as the cramps took hold of her. The room was spinning. She reached down to touch the mysterious liquid and was amazed to behold its deep, rich red. As her child body moaned, Annie floated up through the clouds, where she could see the constellations of Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda quite clearly. I see it out there, a new wave just beginning to take shape. If I look at it straight on, it disappears, but from out of the corner of my eye, if I barely squint, I can see the foam emerging, rising slowly on its inevitable journey to shore. "Have faith," father cautioned me as he chained me to this place. Mother watched silently, knowingly, and then spoke in a voice that I had never heard in her before, one that shook me with the power of its soft-spoken strength. I recognize it now. Athena was speaking through her, "Though chained, never chained. Though eaten, never consumed. When time comes, remember sound. Let it flow and become you." Just then, Annie felt a humming sensation building within her, making its way from inside her own cavernous underworld to the world outside it. The humming grew in intensity as her breath deepened. She felt the pain in her distended belly building to a crescendo. No longer bound firmly to the body, she watched the monster rising from the ocean depths as the princess braced herself against the rock. "No more!" Annie cried out. She felt herself falling, like Icarus, only her wings were carved of an ancient pain, and they melted as something even more encompassing accepted this pain, embraced it fully, allowing it to flow through her. She recognized it at last, this great lover within her. She had never been alone. None of them had been. As she fell, a deep resonance emerged from within her womb, that gorgeous, ecstatic energy of creation coming into full bloom. Tears came streaming down her trembling form, offering release to this body that had witnessed and held so much pain in its Earthly sojourn. She sensed the realization. She had mistaken pain for love, had fallen in love with pain time and time again. But now she knew that love transcended pain, transcended sorrow, transcended longing, contained them all and expressed itself as one great eye, an inner vision transforming itself outwards to embrace time and space, reflecting itself endlessly, becoming this Universe of shifting shapes. The power of the resonance shook her body. She felt the rhythm. She felt the heat. Then she heard the most beautiful ringing all around. It contained innumerable tones, and all were resonating in perfect harmony. "It's time," she heard a voice within her say. In that instant, it seemed to Annie that the hospital room turned a brilliant shade of red and filled with the unmistakable scent of roses. A gentle rain began to fall. Annie felt an ocean of crimson flooding her senses as she smiled, ascended the cresting wave of light that she knew now to be Andromeda bound, and drew her final breath. "She's gone," the doctor said as Annie's daughter sat patiently nearby. The girl did not reply and, though trembling, remained sitting in the chair, listening attentively to the descending rain.