Of myth and monument
(A fiction enveloped in fact)
By Gravity Goldberg
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST was a devourer. He had a voracious appetite for other people's words, chewing them up and gorging himself. He spent his life eating, buying, spitting, trying at his deathbed to vomit up a re-creation of the world he'd spent his life consuming.
· · ·
Kali arrived late but was nonetheless furious when she discovered her lover, Shiva, had already left. Uncharacteristically, she even waited to see if he would return. She tapped her foot and glared at the tourists stumbling up and down the steps of the Asian Art Museum in the park. She checked her watch again. He was nowhere to be seen. So she opened her ravenous mouth, stuck out her tongue, and licked the plate clean; in other words, she devoured everything in sight, leaving nothing for Shiva to recognize of the original rendezvous location even if he was to return searching for her.
· · ·
Hearst tore through Europe, leaving in his wake the plundered foundations of stone castles and the bare plinths of marble statues. Indiscreet in his hunger, he acquired voraciously.
· · ·
Kali and Shiva's iconography depicts her standing over him. He lies on his back with a garland of sweet-smelling flowers around his neck; her garland is hideous, with heads dripping blood. Her tongue is out. Shiva gazes up at her adoringly.
They met on the battlefield. After she'd finished terrorizing the enemy she turned around, exhausted, but with a glistening, bloody smile across her face. Her and Shiva's eyes met. Her smile got wider.
· · ·
One structure – the moldering remains of a medieval cloister in northern Spain – captured Hearst's attention, and as he paused to sniff the damp green air of Tagus, he snapped his fingers and demanded that it be purchased posthaste, dismantled, and then delivered back to California.
The local people murmured that the building was haunted.
· · ·
Shiva got Kali's phone number through a mutual friend and called her up to ask her out the very next evening. While getting ready for the date, she swiped her underarms with deodorant at least a half-dozen times; she was really nervous.
· · ·
The monastery was built in 1182. The cloister was added a few years later. It was built on a site once sacred to the priapic god Pan. The church, desiring to insure the salvation of the local villagers, brought in church-approved architects, stonemasons, and builders to erect an edifice to God where the local men could retreat, to separate themselves from the temptation of worldly desires and the influence of their bacchanalian history and contemplate the heavenly meanings of purity, self-sacrifice, and chastity. But the memories in the forest were strong: Breathy whispers excited the imaginations of the architects; the stonemasons dreamed things that they were ashamed of when they woke up the next morning in bed with their wives but treasured in the privacy of the forest. The builders couldn't help themselves. The seminary was decorated with elegantly rounded porticos, round-topped obelisks that, rather than assuring these monks' minds were always and only directed to God, often led their thoughts down to places more worldly.
· · ·
Shiva took her to see a showing of Frankenstein starring Lon Chaney. Afterwards they walked through the park, and when the fog started to descend, he put his arm around her shoulder and she let her head relax. Unfortunately, their idyllic stroll was interrupted when two thugs jumped out of the bushes and demanded Shiva's wallet. But when the beady-eyed thugs recognized Kali they stood down, stammered out apologies, and slunk back into the shadows. Kali turned toward Shiva with a sheepish smile. It totally killed the mood.
When Kali returned home that night, she wished she had a best friend to call and chat with about her date. She felt delicious; not since they named the city of Calcutta after her had she felt so loved. Alas, she had no one to call, so she just sat in front of the mirror, slowly running a comb through her hair while humming softly.
Shiva told his friends about the date, and they warned him that Kali was known to be pretty high-maintenance. She'd thrown a tantrum at the prom when her date showed up without flowers for her. It was like the scene from Carrie, they whispered. Shiva laughed. He was all about the challenge.
· · ·
Hearst brought in workers to dismantle the monastery. They carefully fit it piece by piece into 10,503 packing crates of Norwegian pine and hauled them onto a ship. By donkey or by lark, Hearst had the crates delivered to a remote hillside retreat somewhere in Shasta County. Inside the crates the stones gave off the mossy smell of Gothic novels and European history. The stones were cold to the workmen's touch, landscaped with pits and dried lichen. Last to be unpacked were the columns.
The workmen studied the written instructions their European counterparts had left as to how to put the monastery back together. No one could make sense of them. At first they thought it was because they were written in Korean, but one young man swore up and down that the language was Aramaic, so they called in the professor of linguistics from the local university (who spoke 10 languages if he spoke one), and when he rolled his eyes, straightened his tie, and insisted as politely as possible that, "Well, frankly, it seems that the instructions are in English," no one knew what to think.
The workmen circulated the rumor that the strange old stones were haunted.
· · ·
By the third date they couldn't stop looking at each other. That was the date he surprised her by taking her to a dance club. Kali ne ver was one for dancing, but she knew how much Shiva loved to dance, even being famous for it. Kali stumbled around after him for a few songs but couldn't keep up. He stayed out on the floor, dancing for hours while she sat glowering in the corner. Her tongue hung especially long out of her mouth that evening. The disco ball glinted off of her fangs.
· · ·
Over time the unassembled remains of the monastery settled into the Shasta soil, but too soon the land was to be cultivated and the stones once again had to be removed. They were sold off around the area; some went to landscapers in San Francisco, others were ground into cement, but most were brought to Golden Gate Park and randomly scattered throughout the arboretum and the nearby Asian Art Museum. There amongst the bamboo and the peeling eucalyptus trees, the last of the round-topped columns were unceremoniously abandoned.
· · ·
Kali's revenge was calculated. Shiva wanted to take her out to a fancy restaurant to make it up to her. She ordered everything on the menu and then tore at it with her hands. Around their table were piles of gnawed lamb and rabbit bones, oyster shells, a discarded filet mignon he grabbed from her hand before she chucked it at the waiter, and a cascade of limp spaghetti dripping off the table. Whenever she caught him looking embarrassed, she emitted a low, sharp growl.
· · ·
What most likely happened next is that a Hindu dignitary visited an exhibit at the Asian Art Museum and then traversed the walkway adjacent to the museum umbrellaed by cherry trees. Perhaps it was February, and the trees bloomed with soft, fragrant flowers. Looking to his left, he spied what resembled a cluster of Shiva lingams surrounded by a grove of eucalyptus trees erupting out of nowhere: a fairy ring of mushrooms deep within the forest.
· · ·
That night the dignitary attended a dinner – a function. He made conversation, related his afternoon jaunt and his surprising discovery. There was the tinkle of laughter, the sound of two strangers sharing an inside joke. The tale spread like a miracle; it spread quickly. Soon many astonished Hindus were making puja to what became known as the miracle of the spontaneous Shiva lingam eruption. Some came from as far away as India.
· · ·
Shiva laughed like it was all so much fun. Like she was something wild that he did not need to tame. Kali assumed his act was a pretense but enjoyed it anyway. She went home with him that night, and while he lit candles, she undressed and then slipped underneath the covers wishing she'd remembered to cut her toenails before she'd gone out. When he joined her in the bed, her toenail raked against his thigh. In the morning there was blood on the sheets.
· · ·
The innocuous space behind the museum became a place of puja, or worship. But it also attracted garrulous hippies with ropes of long, knotted hair, babbling. The presence of the hippies attracted the attention of tourists who, tiring of the ostentatious formality of the museum, desired to see a "real" San Francisco scene. The tourists, not knowing any better, often rewarded the hippies with money. The proclamation of readily available "spare change" spread through the networks of the park and drew out the homeless from their entrenchments and encouraged them to gather along with the hippies, the tourists, the Hindus, in a makeshift shantytown around the spray of phallic stones.
· · ·
He read to her from the newspaper, choosing anecdotes that he'd chuckle over while reading them aloud. Often she didn't think they were funny. Once he read her a news article about a bloody junta in Honduras, headless women and children hung like fruit from the trees. She laughed uproariously, "Oh oh oh! What a hoot!"
He didn't join in her laughter; in fact, she thought he looked a tad horrified.
· · ·
Soon the park officials began to investigate why so many people were often wedged behind the Asian Art Museum – after all, it wasn't an official park site, just a place where they had temporarily dumped a few oddly shaped stones. Once it was understood what was happening back there, plans were made for the immediate removal of the wayward stones. Being that this was San Francisco, a committee formed and circulated a petition, hoping to grant the stones religious and historical preservation status. Enough signatures were gathered so that a town hall meeting was convened. Of course, the city mainly took this to be a joke. Yet, when a transgender Shiva-ite who called himself Baba Kali Dass volunteered to cart the largest of the lingams off to his backyard – where, he solemnly promised, it would remain accessible to any and all legitimate believers to come and make puja – the council members sighed with relief and agreed to pay for its transportation. Bulldozers made off with the smaller lingams. Their whereabouts are still unknown.
· · ·
He started calling less often. She wondered if he was seeing someone else. She wondered if only she had somehow done something differently, he wouldn't have drifted off like that. Finally he called. He apologized, told her how much he missed her, but he'd been busy. She cocked her head to the side while listening to him on the phone; she absentmindedly fingered one of the gore-covered skulls that made up the beads of her necklace; she remembered that his breath smelled like earth. They made a date to meet up the following week.
· · ·
The lingam was removed only moments before Kali breathlessly arrived for her rendezvous with Shiva. Kali was furious anyway, but her anger at being stood up fueled her need to devour indiscriminately. And she did. It was the last of the Shiva worshippers straggling in who first noticed the spindly legged goddess gnashing her teeth where once the lingam had stood. They left her offerings of candies, flowers, and songs, but this did not appease her appetite in the least. The other lingams dotted about the grove disappeared, one by one, leaving ugly clumps of dirt where they once stood. Then the trees disappeared, and then she turned upon herself and, apparently satiated, vanished. But it seems that she was only biding her time, because now the museum is also gone.