The Chamber of Subjection

By Unbearable Invention

"Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact." – Judith Butler

Chapter Two: The Immoralist

A cold clitoris wreathed in chrysanthemums: the borders of her geometric body lost in the wintering frost of Hogwart's secret chamber: her body glows with a cistercian pallor as it lies on the cobble-stone floor: two copper coins cover her eyes: the whiskey of her sex drained from sunstained skin and constellations of red-brown lacerations pucker on her skin like toothless mouths: her nakedness murders the moon with magicks made of mercury and quicksilver. –An exquisite corpse, Voldemort says. –Lily Evans-Snape. Your wife. Now dead. Snape turns away and I motion toward the Dementors. –I killed her, I tell Snape. –And now I'm bored. Entertain me, Severus, and prove that you are more loyal than Pettigrew. Make love to her corpse, Severus, and let me watch. Lily. My wife. Black hair cascades like a veil of wounded starlings: limbs like old cedars tangling into knots: a boy stares at me with her eyes: apocryphal stories of Penthesilea and Achilles: obsidian ice frosting in my stomach: Harry is impatient and ready for his lesson. Opening. Longing. Occulemency.

–Occulemency. That is our lesson, I say to Harry. –To protect the mind from the blade that dares to cut internally. To keep the barbarians at the gates. To shroud oneself behind the veil. Prince Gallant and his shining steed, I think: wriggling maggots worm out her stygian lips as I kiss her, oh god, I kiss her.

The twitch of swollen velvet: the seam in Lilly's skirt slashed in a self-conscious rrrrrriiipppp: our bodies moved like sheaths of wheat as we made love: our wedding vows half-remembered and the convex mirror reflects only what it chooses to see: my hand moves between porcelain legs and fingers spread like a peacock's tail. –Oh, Lily, I say to her. –I love you. But I know this isn't real.

–Reality is subjective, Lily tells me and I believe her.

–I speak of power, Harry. Power: the structures of power determine and destroy the foundational self: we are governed and disciplined by power: it acts through us but, in a transitive sense, enacts us into being. The agency we possess is the effect of subordination. I say this to Harry, but do not believe it. – To deny this fact is to risk a sense of the self that is defined by normative and intelligible boundaries: the self that is defined through subordination. To do otherwise would spoil our ontological status as an 'I.' His knees as pale and pink as a blood-smeared seagull garroted and left to die on a seashore: stories embroidered on my skull: narratives of a postlapsarian encounter where menstrual blood stains my lips like a honeyed nectar: fingerformed constellation dotting Harry's supple throat like phantoms: fantasies of his ruined face covered in bloodied hyacinths and the exquisite tenderness of his narrow torso wounded into a purpling knot of hate: the rectal blossom wreathed with red ribbons.

-Remember this: we are constituted in power but can never wield it.

-Wield what?

-Power, I repeated. The smell of his sex and fantasies of diamond-paned flesh: hours pass: twisted bed-sheets: sharp breaths: a restless hand moving downdowndown until the swift, vesuvian orgasm: ectoplasmic memories of Harry immobilized like marble sculpture: pathetic, I think to myself, like Alcibiades drunk with desire: two eyeballs emerge from the obsidian shadow of my room: the ghost of a girl with green, almond-shaped eyes begins to weep as she stares at my pathetic, seminude body: flaccid and full of shame. Phantoms in the wall. Openings. Legs. Lilly.

-Lily. Lily. I'm sorry. I can't help it. But I promise, I will not touch him!

Diaphanous whisper. –Watch over him, Severus.

-What shall we name our child? Snape asks as he presses his ear to my pregnant stomach.

-No names. I say. Names are necessary for self-narration, and stories slash at the throat with a ruined blade.

Please, Lord Voldemort, anything but this! Please do not ask this of me! Oh, please do not ask this of me!

[to be continued]