A  FABLE

Ampicillin dust, composed ivory, ran in bleached ribbons between pulverized morphine and crushed amphetamine sulphate ochre, pigments racing vivid down the length of a captive pattern.   Restrained lines placed with exactitude by hands long isolated from the emotion of their body were, occasionally, wrenched to unhappy life by the agony of elaboration in sawtooth corners and bramble arabesques.  Librium rosettes mapped in powder hovered above the floor on granular legs—narcotic tripods of stimulants and sedatives, antitoxins and antibiotics juxtaposed in lethal proximity. Shifting medicinal grains arranged in a design of painstaking elegance, relinquishing the corrosive potency of their natures for the illusion of resplendent unity, the placebo of cohesion.  A new entity, composed by meticulous fingers from curative snow stripped of its power to cure, materialized in fits and starts of chemical sand, pharmacy gravel laid down with obsessive, mimetic deliberation as an oriental rug.

Chewable vitamins for deficient children, worked into fine sweet grains, were kept in glass vials labeled with florid names that euthanized banal origins: phantom lily, royal plum, cinnabar, verdigris, primrose withered, vermilion, azure drown.  Most had been remixed, not by an orthodox resolve, but with an artist’s eye for color.  Common pinks and blues resurrected as amethyst poured from glass into sinuous paper cones, as the pharmacist turned back to his work on the remotest border; fingers encircling the funnel mouth as a feeding mollusk, guiding the course of dust onto the floor to join the pattern already in place.  His wrists dipped and reared with the solemn precision of one accustomed to always holding back, restraining eccentric movement, subduing rebellious gestures.  Control assured his customers of correct dosages and immaculate medicine, a chance at salvation measured by a meticulous hand.

Time played in sporadic fits and starts at the pharmacy, staccato panic in the mosquito gait of the casually sick—touch of flu, feverish head cold, approaching his counter with the acute anxiety inherent in a temporary interruption of brisk wellness; adagio lethargy in the syrup trail glistening behind the chronically ill, destined to live to rotting ripeness under a deluge of complaints as they traversed his aisles in search of the next magic bullet; diminuendo resignation in the fatally stricken, who would stand beneath his shop sign for an hour or longer before entering, as if crossing the pharmacy threshold was akin to relinquishing life.

Terminal souls rarely peered through the two expansive windows flanking the front door and avoided the transience of their own reflections, but stared up instead at the pharmacy’s wordless icon, a three dimensional mortar carved of dark, wormy oak, hanging from ornate iron hooks.  The pestle was gone, stolen years ago by a young man dying of esophageal cancer, who had used it to grind his last chance pills down to powder, to mix with water and imbibe through a straw; but there had been no curative medication prescribed, no Lazarus potion, and when they found the man’s body his mouth and throat were filled with ordinary chalk.  Soft limestone, pulverized fossil shells of nominal organisms, covered the head of the pestle, which was buried with the man at the pharmacist’s request.

Sulphuric hours were spent channeling analgesic powder into curlicues and diamond head terminals, when the pharmacist turned on the scorching surgical lamps and fed his design with yellow.  It ran concurrent with rich oxides and ornate borders in a shade of gray that reminded him of  Helen’s fear the last time she was wheeled through the double doors that swung together without ever closing.  Imprinted on his iris under the stamp of decades were the intricate patterns on the bottoms of her feet, Helen’s true fingerprint, burned off by sterilizing fluorescent light as the waves and quiet undulations of her most vulnerable flesh were reduced—in the miserly space between doors—to a strip of mummified leather disintegrating under an engineered sun.

With its meticulously realized motifs, the apothecary’s creation had the substantial appearance of a genuine oriental rug, palpable beard of wool mapping a timeless design, saturated hues congealing at knotted roots and trailing off in a haze of drifting fibers, whiskers to sense random travelers and malevolent settlers.  Endurance that warded off mortality, bound life in strands so it could not slip away.

Filaments would accumulate on the old pharmacist’s body, become embedded under his fingernails, curled into the seashell caves of his ears, interwoven with the white and gray follicles of his hair until the two were indistinguishable—a crescent of warm shadow that cradled his head as it moved past store shelves lined with indifferent glass bottles, a burgundy lens that made medicine into elixir for a utopian moment.

Successive incarnations of crushed white, eggshell to bone, had begun to join the warm dust of other balms and palliatives on the rug, but they levitated spectrally as a single disquieting ice line—austere mortal thread laid down over a design of robust optimism.  White was arranged in a wavering trail without closure, the shape of loss that defined the outline of Helen’s body exactly where he had found it.

Another siphoned woman came to see the pharmacist with a damp prescription and weeping palms.  She had that particular haunting, poised spectrally between stalking illness and invasion.  He knew it in thousands of customers passing through his aisles towards the main counter, expectancy tempered by bleak truth; their pupils became irrelevant dents on eyes hammered to a mirror finish, which only spit back images of the chemist’s face and gave nothing away, but the defeated rounding of their backs and accordion grief compressing their necks made soft bellies swell to tender repast, in anticipation of being sliced open and carved from inside.  It was exceedingly difficult in these cases to maintain the anticipated expression of professional faith, one which wordlessly assured them of healing through the infallible science of recovery.

Every night the woman lingered outside his pharmacy door, leaning against the gold ampersand on the window lettering and eating lurid green candy from a bag, each oval passing radioactive in front of the streetlight and towards her mouth with a toxic glow.  She was still taking in select bits of the world which gave her up without remorse, and her face lay open with glistening pulp expectancy, but too many cells had metastasized to her lymphatic vessels and the chance to steal back health was gone.  Inside his hushed glass tank, he could hear the woman sucking and suffocating, encased in jaded sugar, tangled in seaweed and drowning anew each night under verdant ribbons as she swallowed another confection.  She would consume the entire bag, all the while watching him dust the shelves, draw clattery oak blinds, lock away all his potions with a single tarnished key and walk past the long window to disappear around the building’s edge.  Still grinding the sand of lancing green shards when she turned the corner to follow him, her mouth was always raw as the pharmacist passed by and gently tipped his hat to her dignity, forgiving her slithering desperation. Heel had barely cleared brick when she set off to follow him night after night, but the adjoining street was always empty and the old chemist with the hobbled stride had again disappeared.

Crawling nightmares had finally scuttled back into the earth to render her first dreamless sleep, and the eroded woman rose the next morning with untouchable innocence, newness grafted over the chasms left by disease.  She visited the apothecary that evening with a bag of decorated chocolates in hand, eclipsing the streetlight as each dense, impenetrable morsel neared her mouth.  Lingering cocoa infused with vanilla lay protectively on her tongue as she turned the corner to follow him, her mouth healed and content under benevolent umber as the pharmacist strode past and gently tipped his hat to her dignity.  The woman waited until his coattail vanished behind the wall and immediately set off to follow him, but the pharmacist had vanished, as always.  This time the adjoining street was also gone, row houses and shops solid with existence only the night before had evaporated with the transience of morning sweat from leaf spines.  For a shaved second there was nothing to replace them, just the scent of hoary wood collecting still water.

In the woman’s hand was liquid, then wool—the pharmacist’s coattail.  He turned to face her and tipped his hat to her perseverance, folding mist beneath his arm as he revolved on curious ground.  Animated currents obscured realms below and above with sculpted air traveling in ram horn gusts, spinning fiddleheads, languorous scrolls, feeding carp flurries,  telescoping squalls, heart valve microbursts opening and closing.  Everywhere the breath of other souls.

There was no horizon, yet a coiling breeze carried the earthy scent of caves and cloistered moss.  Neither ran to the comfort of language as they walked in silence, deeper into the whispering fleece.  The pharmacist took the woman’s hand, now restored from withering, and they continued listening to zephyrs and sinking footfalls on cradling ground.  Contrary geometry began to crystallize from the haze, sharp angles and cutting planes of humanity.  Others emerged in stained glass fragments—sliver legs and needle arms advancing in delicate slices, pointed necks wedged into cloven backs—jagged mortal scraps denied the contentment of sleep as complete organisms, now reasserting their unity.  People appeared and dissipated again, cycles of condensation and evaporation, distilling years of life into a single droplet, which burned away in the heat of the uniformity of death.

Moisture gathered on the woman’s own dry skin, coalesced into rivulets, raced towards a common point on her hand with magnetic fervor to form a tiny orb; drawn into the water, she could discern neither her own flesh beneath nor reflection above, but saw herself as a young girl newly torn from childhood, the year her parents happily relinquished their protection and set her adrift without illusions, the day they gladly unharnessed two lifetimes of trial and sentence, easily strapped the weight of adult burden onto their child’s delicate haunches and watched as her joints splintered and broke skin with betrayal force.  The moment her skin became so arid that any moisture forming on its surface instantly burned away.

Releasing the woman’s hand in a series of eloquently calligraphed gestures that assured his enduring protection, the pharmacist gave her comfort next to a sheltering wave of rich wood, in a glade of oak luxuriant with burls and meandering roots, chestnut glens lined with warm alcoves and quiet niches.  Valley of the Kings. She was resplendent in this necropolis, glistening and strong.

All the pharmacist’s children begin to emerge, desperate patrons tethered to his shop, vestigial hope for the dying: the man whose veins collapsed with the force of a winter forest under ice; lunar woman whose skin dissolved in lesions round enough to mimic the shape of her terminal eyes; elegant young body that rejected its common, borrowed heart; withered hovel of limbs and organs that had once lived as an athlete; indistinct totem shorn of hair and teeth—anchored form of erased features—that had climbed beyond herself and plunged fearlessly, year after year, into blank canvases to create paintings of wrenching clarity. Past imperfect was neutralized as they passed whole through the dark wood of the mortar and into the cradle of its bowl.

The shop sign moved almost imperceptibly as the pharmacist emanated from the mortar.  Adjusting the angle of his hat to block out the rising sun, he smoothed down upstart wool and tried to perfect the line of his coattails to rise and fall in time with his gait, but they swung together without ever closing.  There was still a lump in the wool, each time the same matted thickness that clung too tightly to one leg, refused to leave him despite its tormenting pain and deformities that twisted the refined fabric into stillborn grotesque.  As the alchemist entered his store, passed through shelves of remedies, cures leering under glass, he remembered Helen’s fear the last time she was wheeled through the double doors that swung together without ever closing.  Imprinted on his iris under the stamp of decades were the intricate patterns on the bottoms of her feet, Helen’s true fingerprint, burned off again by the morning sun.

Copyright  c  March 7, 2003 – Julie Rauer