The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Go back to your seat,” she says again, and I do. I turn and go back to my seat, returning the M9 to its shoulder holster, and sit staring at my hands or staring out the train window for what seems hours and hours and hours and . . .

  06. Marlene Dietrich

  I sit alone at the foot of the bed, “south” of that sprawling river delta and the low damp-sheet hills beyond, all rearranged now by the geological upheaval of my movements. I sit there smoking and shivering and watching the dirty rainwater dripping onto the white tiles covering the floor of the room. The phonograph is playing “I May Never Go Home Anymore,” and I know all the words, though I cannot remember ever having heard the song before.

  “I have always loved her voice,” the albino woman says from her place at the window, behind me and to my left.

  “It’s Marlene Dietrich, isn’t it?” I ask, wishing I could say if I have always been afflicted with this patchwork memory. Perhaps this is merely the nature of memory, and that’s something else I’ve forgotten.

  “That wasn’t her birth name,” the white woman replies. “But it wasn’t a stage name, either. Her parents named her Marie Magdalene—”

  “Just like Jesus’ whore,” I say, interrupting. She ignores me.

  “I read somewhere that Dietrich changed it, when she was still a teenager in Schöneberg. Marlene is a contraction of Marie Magdalene. Did you know that? I always thought that was quite clever of her.”

  I shrug and take a long drag on my cigarette, then glance at the scrapbook lying open on the bed next to me. The black-and-white photographs are all numbered, beginning with .0001, though I’m not at all sure they were the last time I went through it. The voice of the long-dead actress fills the room, making it seem somehow warmer.

  Don’t ever think about tomorrow.

  For tomorrow may never come.

  “You should have another good look at the book,” the albino woman suggests.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to see there. I don’t understand what it is you want me to tell you. I’ve never seen that man before. I don’t remember ever having seen that man before.”

  “Of course you don’t. But you need to realise, we’re running out of time. You’re running out of time, love.”

  Time is nothing as long as I’m living it up this way.

  I may never go home anymore.

  I turn my head and watch her watching whatever lies on the other side of the windowpane. I still have not had the nerve to look for myself. Some part of me does not want to know, and some part of me still suspects there may be no more to the world than this room. If I look out that window, I might see nothing at all, because nothing may be all there is to see. When I fashioned the flat, rectangular world of the bed, and then this white room which must be the vault of the heavens which surround it, perhaps I stopped at the room’s four walls. Plaster painted the same white as the floor tiles and the ceiling and the light shining down from those bare fluorescent stars. Beyond that, there is no more, the edges of my universe, the practical boundaries of my cosmic bubble.

  “She really did a number on your skull,” the albino says. “I don’t know how they expect me to get anything, between the goddamn firewall and what she did.”

  “What did she do?” I ask, not really wanting to know that either, but it doesn’t matter, because the albino woman does not answer me. She’s still naked, as am I. I still do not know her name. “Are we in Kyoto?” I ask.

  “Why the hell would they bother slinging a wog sniper all the way the fuck to Japan?” she wants to know, and I have no answer for that. I seem to have no answers at all.

  I’ve got kisses and kisses galore,

  That have never been tasted before.

  “Just be a good little girl and look at the book again,” she says to me. “Maybe this time you’ll see something that you’ve missed.”

  I breathe a grey cloud of smoke out through my nostrils, then pick the scrapbook up off the bed. The covers are very slightly damp from lying there on the damp sheets. I don’t suppose it matters. I turn the pages and smoke my cigarette. The same careworn, hollow-eyed, middle-aged face looking back at me as before, staring back at whomever took all these pictures. I turn another page, coming to page number nine, the four photos designated .0033 through .0036, and none of it means any more to me than it did the last time through.

  “I think that I may remember a good deal about Kyoto,” I say. “But I don’t remember anything at all about Greece. And I don’t look Greek, do I?”

  “You don’t look Japanese, either.”

  One last puff, then I drop the butt of my cigarette to the wet tiles, and it sizzles there for half a moment. I run my fingers slowly over the four glossy photographs on the page, as if touching them might make some sort of difference. And, as it happens, I do see a scar on the man’s chin I hadn’t noticed before. I examine some of the other pages, and the scar is there on every single one of them.

  “If I don’t find it, whatever it is you want me to find in here—”

  “—there are going to be a lot of disappointed people, Sunshine, and you’ll be the first.”

  “Can I have another cigarette?” I ask her.

  “Just look at the damned book,” she replies, so that’s what I do. It’s open to page fifteen, .0057–.0060. I try focusing on what the man’s wearing instead of his face, but all I can see is the collar of a light-coloured T-shirt, and it’s the same in every photograph. My eyes are so tired, and I shut them for a moment. I can almost imagine that the flat illumination from the fluorescent bulbs is draining me somehow, diminishing me, both body and soul. But then I remember that the white woman took my soul when she fucked me, so never mind. I sit there with my eyes shut, listening to the dripping water and listening to Marlene Dietrich and wishing I could at least remember if I’ve ever had a name.

  If you treat me right, this might be the night.

  I may never go home, I may never go home.

  I may never go home anymore.

  I may never go home anymore.

  08. The Fire Escape

  When I found the umbrella leaning in one corner of the room and opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, she didn’t try to stop me. She did not even say a word. And there is a world beyond the white room, after all. But it isn’t Kyoto. It is no city that I have seen or even dreamt of before. It must be a city, because I cannot imagine what else it could possibly be. I’m sitting with the window and the redbrick wall of the motel on my right, my naked ass against the icy steel grating, and the falling rain is very loud on the clear polyvinyl canopy of the umbrella. I think I might never have been this cold in all my life, and I don’t know why I didn’t take her robe as well. If I have clothes of my own, they are not anywhere to be found in the room.

  I peer through the rain-streaked umbrella and try to find words that would do justice to the intricate, towering structures rising up all around me and the motel (that it is a motel, I will readily admit, is only a working assumption, and why motel and not hotel?). But I know I don’t possess that sort of vocabulary. Maybe the peculiar staccato language the albino woman spoke when she came, maybe it contains nouns and verbs equal to these things I see.

  They are both magnificent and terrible, these edifices that might be buildings and railways, smokestacks and turbines, streets and chimneys and great glass atriums. They are awful. That word might come the closest, in all its connotations. I will not say they are beautiful, for there is something loathsome about these bizarre structures. At least, to me they seem bizarre; I cannot say with any certainty that they are in an absolute, objective sense. Possibly, I am the alien here, me and this unremarkable redbrick motel. Thinking through this amnesiac mist locked up inside my head, there is no solid point of reference left to me, no external standard by which I may judge. There is only gut reaction, and my gut reaction is that they are bizarre and loathsome things.

  The air out here smells like rain and ozone, carbon monoxid
e and chemicals I do not know the names for, and yet it still smells very much cleaner than the white room with its soggy miasma of mold and slow decay.

  These spiraling, jointed, ribsy things which might be the skyscrapers of an unnamed or unnamable city, they are as intricate as the calcareous or chitinous skeletons of deep-sea creatures. There. I do have a few words, though they are utterly insufficient. They are mere approximations of what I see. So, yes, they seem organic, these towers, as though they are the product not of conscious engineering and construction but of evolution and ontogeny. They have grown here, I think—all of them—and I wonder if the men and women who planted the necessary seeds or embryos, however many ages ago, are anything like the albino who took my soul away.

  And then I hear the noise of vast machineries . . . no, I have been hearing this noise all along, but only now has my amazement or apprehension or awe at the sight of this city dimmed enough that I look for the source of the sounds. And I see, not far away, there is a sort of clearing in this urban, industrial carapace. And I can see the muddy earth ripped open there, red as a wound in any living creature. There are great indescribable contraptions busy making the wound much larger, gouging and drilling out buckets or mouthfuls of mud and meat to be dumped upon steaming spoilage heaps or fed onto conveyer belts that stretch away into the foggy distance.

  And there is something in that hole, something still only partly exposed by the exertions of these machines that might not be machines at all. Something I know (and no, I cannot say how I could ever know such a thing) has lain there undisturbed and sleeping for millennia, and now they mean to wake it up.

  I look away. I’ve seen too much already.

  Something is creeping slowly along the exterior of one of the strange buildings, and it might be a living tumor—a malignant mass of tissue and corruption and ideas—and, then again, it might be nothing more than an elevator.

  I hear knuckles rapping on a windowpane, and when I turn my head back towards the motel, the albino woman is watching me with her bright blue eyes.

  07. The Book (II)

  Don’t ever think about tomorrow.

  For tomorrow may never come.

  And then the albino woman lifts the phonograph needle from the record and, instantly, the music goes away. I wish she had let it keep on playing, over and over and over, because now the unceasing drip, drip, drip from the ceiling to the tiles seems so much louder than when I had the song and Marlene Dietrich’s voice to concentrate on. The woman turns my way on her whirring robotic legs and stares at me.

  “You never did tell me what happened to your arm,” she says and smiles.

  “Did you ask?”

  “I believe that I did, yes.”

  I am sitting there at the foot of the bed with the scrapbook lying open on my lap, my shriveled left arm held close to my chest. And it occurs to me that I do not know what happened to my arm, and also it occurs to me that I have no recollection whatsoever of there being anything at all wrong with it before she asked how it got this way. And then this third observation, which seems only slightly less disconcerting than having forgotten that I’m a cripple (like her), and that I must have been a cripple for a very long time: the book is open to photos .0705–.0708, page 177, and I notice that beside each photo’s number are distinct and upraised dimples, like Braille, though I do not know for certain this is Braille. I flip back a few pages and see that, yes, the dimples are there on every page.

  “That’s very thoughtful,” I say, so softly that I am almost whispering. “I might have been blind, after all.”

  “You might be yet,” the white woman says.

  “If I were,” I reply without looking up from the book, “I couldn’t even see the damned photographs, much less find whatever it is you think I can find in here.”

  “You don’t get off that easily,” she laughs, and her noisy mechanical legs carry her from the table with the phonograph to the bed, and she begins the arduous and apparently painful process of detaching herself from the contraptions. I try to focus on the book, trying not to watch the albino or hear the dripping ceiling or smell the dank stench of the room. Trying only to see the photographs. I don’t ask why anyone would bother to provide Braille numbers for photographs that a blind person could not see. And this time, she kindly does not answer my unasked question. I return to page 177, then proceed to 178, then on to 179.

  “Shit,” the albino woman hisses, forcing her curse out through clenched teeth as she disconnects the primary neural lead to her right thigh. There’s thick, dark pus and a bead of fresh blood clinging to the plug. More pus leaks from the port and runs down the stump of her leg.

  “Is it actually worth all that trouble and discomfort?” I ask. “Wouldn’t a wheelchair be—”

  “Why don’t you try to mind your own goddamn business,” she barks at me, and so I do. I go back to the scrapbook, back to photos .0713–.0716 and that face I know I will be seeing for a long time to come, whenever I shut my eyes. I will see him in my sleep, if I am allowed to live long enough to ever sleep again.

  The woman sighs a halting, painful sort of sigh and eases herself back onto the sheets, freed now from the prosthetics, which are left standing side by side at the foot of the bed.

  “I picked up a patch bug a while back,” she says. “Some sort of cross-scripting germ, a quaint little XSSV symbiote. But it’s being treated. It’s nothing lethal.”

  And that’s when I see it. She’s stretched out there next to me talking about viruses and slow-purge reboots, and I notice the puffy reddish rim surrounding photograph number .0715. This page is infected, like the albino woman and her robotic legs, and the site of the infection is right here beneath .0715.

  “I think I’ve found it,” I say and press the pad of my thumb gently to the photograph. It’s hot to the touch, and I can feel something moving about beneath the haggard face of the man with the shaved head and the scar on his chin.

  She props herself up on her elbows when I hold the scrapbook out so that she can see. “Well, well,” she says. “Maybe you have, and maybe you haven’t. Either way, Sunshine, it’s going to hurt when you pull that scab away.”

  “Is that what I’m supposed to do?” I ask her, laying the heavy scrapbook back across my lap. Even as I watch, the necrosis has begun to spread across the page towards the other three photographs.

  “Do it quickly,” she says, and I can hear the eagerness in her voice. “Like pulling off a sticky plaster. Do it fast, and maybe it’ll hurt less.”

  “Is this what you wanted me to find? Is this it?”

  “You’re stalling,” she says. “Just fucking do it.”

  And then the black telephone begins to ring again.

  09. Exit Music (The Gun)

  Sitting beneath the transparent canopy of the borrowed umbrella, sitting naked in the rain on the fire escape, and now she’s standing over me, held up by all those shiny chrome struts and gears and pistons. She did not even have to open the window or climb out over the sill, but I cannot ever explain, in words, how it was she exited the room. It only matters that she did. It only matters that she’s standing over me holding the Beretta 9mm, aiming it at my head.

  “I never made any promises,” she tells me, and I nod (because that’s true) and lower the umbrella and fold it shut. I support my useless left arm with my right and stare directly up into the cold rain, wishing there were anything falling from that leaden sky clean enough to wash away the weight of all these things I cannot remember or will never be permitted to remember.

  “The war isn’t going well,” she says. “We’ve lost Hsinchu and Changhua. I think we all know that Taipei can’t be far behind. Too many feedback loops. Way too many scratch hits.”

  “Nothing to be desired anymore,” I say and taste the bitter, toxic raindrops on my tongue.

  “Nothing at all,” she tells me, setting the muzzle of the M9 to my right temple. I am already so chilled I do not feel the cold steel, only the pressure of the gun
against my skin. The rain stings my eyes, and I blink. I take a deep breath and try not to shiver.

  “Whatever they’re digging up over there,” and I nod towards the excavations, “they should stop. You should tell them that soon, before they wake it up.”

  “You think they’d listen . . . to someone like me?” she asks. “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

  Above me and all around me this lifeless, living husk that might be a city or only the mummified innards of some immense biomechanoid crustacean goes on about its clockwork day-to-day affairs, all its secret metabolisms, its ancient habits. It does not see me—or seeing me, it shows even less regard for me than I might show a single mite nestled deep within a single eyelash follicle. I gaze up at that inscrutable tangle of spires and flying buttresses, rotundas and acroterion flourishes and all the thousands of solemn gushing rainspouts.

  “Do not feel unloved,” she says, and I shut my eyes and sense all the world move beneath me.

  THE APE’S WIFE

  NEITHER YET AWAKE nor quite asleep, she pauses in her dreaming to listen to the distant sounds of the jungle approaching twilight. They are each balanced now between one world and another—she between sleep and waking, and the jungle between day and night. Dreaming, she is once again the woman she was before she came to the island, the starving woman on that other island, that faraway island that was not warm and green, but had come to seem to her always cold and grey, stinking of dirty snow and the exhaust of automobiles and buses. She stands outside a lunch room on Mulberry Street, her empty belly rumbling as she watches other people eat. The evening begins to fill up with the raucous screams of nocturnal birds and flying reptiles and a gentle tropical wind rustling through the leaves of banana and banyan trees, through cycads and ferns grown as tall or taller than the brick and steel and concrete canyon that surrounds her.