The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “No, no . . . I want you to put this in your article. I want them to print it in that magazine you write for, because it seems to me that people ought to know. If they’re still so infatuated with the mermaids after all this time, it doesn’t seem fitting that they don’t know. It seems almost indecent.”

  I don’t remind her that I’m a freelance and the article’s being done on spec, so there’s no guarantee anyone’s going to buy it, or that it will ever be printed and read. And that information feels indecent, too, but I keep my mouth shut and listen while she talks. I can always nurse my guilty conscience later on.

  “The summer before I met him, before we started working together,” she begins, and then pauses to take another drag on her cigarette. Her eyes return to the painting behind me. “I suppose that would have been the summer of 1937. The Depression was still on, but his family, out on Long Island, they’d come through it better than most. He had money. Sometimes he’d take commissions from magazines, if the pay was decent. The New Yorker, that was one he did some work for, and Harper’s Bazaar, and Collier’s, but I guess you know this sort of thing, having done so much research on his life.”

  The ash on her Marlboro is growing perilously long, though she seems not to have noticed. I glance about and spot an ashtray, heavy lead glass, perched on the edge of a nearby coffee table. It doesn’t look as though it’s been emptied in days or weeks, another argument against the reality of the Cuban maid. My armchair squeaks and pops angrily when I lean forward to retrieve it. I offer it to her, and she takes her eyes off the painting just long enough to accept it and to thank me.

  “Anyway,” she continues, “mostly he was able to paint what he wanted. That was a freedom that he never took for granted. He was staying in Atlantic City that summer, because he said he liked watching the people on the boardwalk. Sometimes, he’d sit and sketch them for hours, in charcoal and pastels. He showed quite a lot of the boardwalk sketches to me, and I think he always meant to do paintings from them, but, to my knowledge, he never did.

  “That summer, he was staying at the Traymore, which I never saw, but he said was wonderful. Many of his friends and acquaintances would go to Atlantic City in the summer, so he never lacked for company if he wanted it. There were the most wonderful parties, he told me. Sometimes, in the evenings, he’d go down onto the beach alone, onto the sand, I mean, because he said the waves and the gulls and the smell of the sea comforted him. In his studio, the one he kept on the Upper West Side, there was a quart mayonnaise jar filled with seashells and sand dollars and the like. He’d picked them all up at Atlantic City over the years. Some of them we used as props in the paintings, and he also had a cabinet with shells from Florida and Nassau and the Cape and I don’t know where else. He showed me conchs and starfish from the Mediterranean and Japan, I remember. Seashells from all over the world, easily. He loved them, and driftwood, too.”

  She taps her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and stares at the painting of the mermaid and the lighthouse, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s drawing some sort of courage from it, the requisite courage needed to break a promise she’s kept for seventy years. A promise she made three decades before my own birth. And I know now how to sum up the smell of her apartment. It smells like time.

  “It was late July, and the sun was setting,” she says, speaking very slowly now, as though every word is being chosen with great and deliberate care. “And he told me that he was in a foul temper that evening, having fared poorly at a poker game the night before. He played cards. He said it was one of his only weaknesses.

  “At any rate, he went down onto the sand, and he was barefoot, he said. I remember that, him telling me he wasn’t wearing shoes.” And it occurs to me then that possibly none of what I’m hearing is the truth, that she’s spinning a fanciful yarn so I won’t be disappointed, lying for my benefit, or because her days are so filled with monotony and she is determined this unusual guest will be entertained. I push the thoughts away. There’s no evidence of deceit in her voice. Art journalism hasn’t made me rich or well known, but I have gotten pretty good at knowing a lie when I hear one.

  “He said to me, ‘The sand was so cool beneath my feet.’ He walked for a while, and then, just before dark, came across a group of young boys, eight or nine years old, and they were crowded around something that had washed up on the beach. The tide was going out, and what the boys had found, it had been stranded by the retreating tide. He recalled thinking it odd that they were all out so late, the boys, that they were not at dinner with their families. The lights were coming on along the boardwalk.”

  Now she suddenly averts her eyes from the painting on the wall of her apartment, Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock, as though she’s taken what she needs and it has nothing left to offer. She crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray and doesn’t look at me. She chews at her lower lip, chewing away some of the lipstick. The old woman in the wheelchair does not appear sad nor wistful. I think it’s anger, that expression, and I want to ask her why she’s angry. Instead, I ask what it was the boys found on the beach, what the artist saw that evening. She doesn’t answer right away, but closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly, raggedly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to press you. If you want to stop—”

  “I do not want to stop,” she says, opening her eyes again. “I have not come this far, and said this much, only to stop. It was a woman, a very young woman. He said that she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen or twenty. One of the children was poking at her with a stick, and he took the stick and shooed them all away.”

  “She was drowned?” I ask.

  “Maybe. Maybe she drowned first. But she was bitten in half. There was nothing much left of her below the ribcage. Just bone and meat and a big hollowed-out place where all her organs had been, her stomach and lungs and everything. Still, there was no blood anywhere. It was like she’d never had a single drop of blood in her. He told me, ‘I never saw anything else even half that horrible.’ And, you know, that wasn’t so long after he’d come back to the States from the war in Spain, fighting against the fascists, the Francoists. He was at the Siege of Madrid and saw awful, awful things there. He said to me, ‘I saw atrocities, but this was worse . . .’”

  And then she trails off and glares down at the ashtray in her lap, at a curl of smoke rising lazily from her cigarette butt.

  “You don’t have to go on,” I say, almost whispering. “I’ll understand—”

  “Oh hell,” she says and shrugs her frail shoulders. “There isn’t that much left to tell. He figured that a shark did it, maybe one big shark or several smaller ones. He took her by the arms, and he hauled what was left of her up onto the dry sand, up towards the boardwalk, so she wouldn’t be swept back out to sea. He sat down beside the body, because at first he didn’t know what to do, and he said he didn’t want to leave her alone. She was dead, but he didn’t want to leave her alone. I don’t know how long he sat there, but he said it was dark when he finally went to find a policeman.

  “The body was still there when they got back. No one had disturbed it. The little boys had not returned. But he said the whole affair was hushed up, because the chamber of commerce was afraid that a shark scare would frighten away the tourists and ruin the rest of the season. It had happened before. He said he went straight back to the Traymore and packed his bags, got a ticket on the next train to Manhattan. And he never visited Atlantic City ever again, but he started painting the mermaids, the very next year, right after he found me. Sometimes,” she says, “I think maybe I should have taken it as an insult. But I didn’t, and I still don’t.”

  And then she falls silent, the way a storyteller falls silent when a tale is done. She takes another deep breath, rolls her wheelchair back about a foot or so, until it bumps hard against one end of the chaise lounge. She laughs nervously and lights another cigarette. And I ask her other questions, but they have nothing whatsoever to do w
ith Atlantic City or the dead woman. We talk about other painters she’s known, and jazz musicians, and writers, and she talks about how much New York’s changed, how much the whole world has changed around her. As she speaks, I have the peculiar, disquieting sensation that, somehow, she’s passed the weight of that seventy-year-old secret on to me, and I think even if the article sells (and now I don’t doubt that it will) and a million people read it, a hundred million people, the weight will not be diminished.

  This is what it’s like to be haunted, I think, and then I try to dismiss the thought as melodramatic, or absurd, or childish. But her jade-and-surf-green eyes, the mermaids’ eyes, are there to assure me otherwise.

  It’s almost dusk before we’re done. She asks me to stay for dinner, but I make excuses about needing to be back in Boston. I promise to mail her a copy of the article when I’ve finished, and she tells me she’ll watch for it. She tells me how she doesn’t get much mail anymore, a few bills and ads, but nothing she ever wants to read.

  “I am so very pleased that you contacted me,” she says, as I slip the recorder and my steno pad back into the briefcase and snap it shut.

  “It was gracious of you to talk so candidly with me,” I reply, and she smiles.

  I only glance at the painting once more, just before I leave. Earlier, I thought I might call someone I know, an ex who owns a gallery in the East Village. I owe him a favor, and the tip would surely square us. But standing there, looking at the pale, scale-dappled form of a woman bobbing in the frothing waves, her wet black hair tangled with wriggling crabs and fish, and nothing at all but a hint of shadow visible beneath the wreath of her floating hair, seeing it as I’ve never before seen any of the mermaids, I know I won’t make the call. Maybe I’ll mention the painting in the article I write, and maybe I won’t.

  She follows me to the door, and we each say our goodbyes. I kiss her hand when she offers it to me. I don’t believe I’ve ever kissed a woman’s hand, not until this moment. She locks the door behind me, two deadbolts and a chain, and then I stand in the hallway. It’s much cooler here than it was in her apartment, in the shadows that have gathered despite the windows at either end of the corridor. There are people arguing loudly somewhere in the building below me, and a dog barking. By the time I descend the stairs and reach the sidewalk, the streetlamps are winking on.

  HYDRARGUROS

  01.

  THE VERY FIRST TIME I see silver, it’s five minutes past noon on a Monday and I’m crammed into a seat on the Bridge Line, racing over the slate-grey Delaware River. Philly is crouched at my back, and a one o’clock with the Czech and a couple of his meatheads is waiting for me on the Jersey side of the Ben Franklin. I’ve been popping since I woke up half an hour late, the lucky greens Eli scores from his chemist somewhere in Devil’s Pocket, so my head’s buzzing almost bright and cold as the sun pouring down through the late January clouds. My gums are tingling, and my fucking fingertips, too, and I’m sitting here, wishing I was just about anywhere else but on my way to Camden, payday at journey’s end or no payday at journey’s end. I’m trying to look at nothing that isn’t out there, on the opposite side of the window, because faces always make me jumpy when I’m using the stuff Eli assures me is mostly only methylphenidate with a little Phenotropil by way of his chemist’s Russian connections. I’m in my seat, trying to concentrate on the shadow of the span and the Speedline on the water below, on the silhouettes of buildings to the south, on a goddamn flock of birds, anything out there to keep me focused, keep me awake. But then my ears pop, and there’s a second or two of dizziness before I smell ozone and ammonia and something with the carbon stink of burning sugar.

  We’re almost across the bridge by then, and I tell myself not to look, not to dare fucking look, just mind my own business and watch the window, my sickly, pale reflection in the window, and the dingy winter scene the window’s holding at bay. But I look anyhow.

  There’s a very pretty woman sitting across the aisle from me, her skin as dark as freshly ground coffee, her hair dreadlocked and pulled back away from her face. Her eyes are a brilliant, bottomless green. For a seemingly elastic moment, I am unable to look away from those eyes. They manage to be both merciful and fierce, like the painted eyes of Catholic saints rendered in plaster of Paris. And I’m thinking it’s no big, and I’ll be able to look back out the window; who gives a shit what that smell might have been. It’s already starting to fade. But then the pretty woman turns her head to the left, towards the front of the car, and quicksilver trickles from her left nostril and spatters her jeans. If she felt it—if she’s in any way aware of this strange excrescence—she shows no sign that she felt it. She doesn’t wipe her nose or look down at her pants. If anyone else saw what I saw, they’re busy pretending like they didn’t. I call it quicksilver, though I know that’s not what I’m seeing. Even this first time, I know it’s only something that looks like mercury, because I have no frame of reference to think of it any other way.

  The woman turns back towards me, and she smiles. It’s a nervous, slightly embarrassed sort of smile, and I suppose I must have been sitting there gawking at her. I want to apologize. Instead, I force myself to go back to the window, and curse that Irish cunt who’s been selling Eli fuck knows what. I curse myself for being such a lazy asshole and popping whatever’s at hand when I have access to good clean junk. And then the train is across that filthy, poisoned river and rolling past Campbell Field and Pearl Street. My heart’s going a mile a minute, and I’m sweating like it’s August. I grip the handle of the shiny aluminum briefcase I’m supposed to hand over to the Czech, assuming he has the cash, and do my best to push back everything but my trepidation of things I know I’m not imagining. You don’t go into a face-to-face with one of El Diamante’s bastards with a shake on, not if you want to keep the red stuff on the inside where it fucking belongs.

  I don’t look at the pretty black woman again.

  02.

  The very first thing you learn about the Czech is that he’s not from the Czech Republic or the dear departed Czech Socialist Republic or, for that matter, Slovakia. He’s not even European. He’s just some Canuck motherfucker who used to haunt Montreal, selling cloned phones and heroin and whores. A genuine Renaissance crook, the Czech. I have no idea where or when or why he picked up the nickname, but it stuck like shit on the wall of a gorilla’s cage. The second thing you learn about the Czech is not to ask about the scars. If you’re lucky, you’ve learned both these things before you have the misfortune of making his acquaintance up close and personal.

  Anyway, he has a car waiting for me when the train dumps me out at Broadway Station, but I make the driver wait while I pay too much for bottled water at Starbucks. The lucky greens have me in such a fizz I’m almost seeing double, and there are rare occasions when a little H2O seems to help bring me down again. I don’t actually expect this will be one of those times, but I’m still a bit weirded out by what I think I saw on the Speedline, and I’m a lot pissed that the Czech’s dragged me all the way over to Jersey at this indecent hour on a Monday. So, let the driver idle for five while I buy a lukewarm bottle of Dasani that I know is just twelve ounces of Philly tap water with a fancy blue label slapped on it.

  “Czech, he don’t like to be kept waiting,” says the skinny Mexican kid behind the wheel when I climb into the backseat. I show him my middle finger, and he shrugs and pulls away from the curb. I set the briefcase on the seat beside me, just wanting to be free of the package and on my way back to Eli and our cozy dump of an apartment in Chinatown. As the jet-black Lincoln MKS turns off Broadway onto Mickle Boulevard, heading west, carrying me back towards the river, I think how I’m going to have a chat with Eli about finding a better pusher. My gums feel like I’ve been chewing foil, and there are wasps darting about behind my eyes. At least the wasps are keeping their stingers to themselves.

  “Just how late are we?” I ask the driver.

  “Ten minutes,” he replies.

  “
Blame the train.”

  “You blame the train, Mister. I don’t talk to the Czech unless he talks to me, and he never talks to me.”

  “Fortunate you,” I say, and take another swallow of Dasani. It tastes more like the polyethylene terephthalate bottle than water, and I try not to think about toxicity and esters of phthalic acid, endocrine disruption, and antimony trioxide, because that just puts me right back on the Bridge Line watching a pretty woman’s silver nosebleed.

  We stop at a red light, then turn left onto South Third Street, paralleling the waterfront, and I realize the drop’s going to be the warehouse on Spruce. I want to close my eyes, but all those lucky green wasps won’t let me. The sun is so bright it seems to be flashing off even the most nonreflective of surfaces. Vast seas of asphalt might as well be goddamn mirrors. I drum my fingers on the lid of the aluminum briefcase, wishing the driver had the radio on or a DVD playing, anything to distract me from the buzz in my skull and the noise the tires make against the pavement. Another three or four long minutes and we’re bumping off the road into a parking lot that might have last been paved when Obama was in the White House. And the Mexican kid pulls up at the loading bay, and I open the door and step out into the cold, sunny day. The Lincoln has stirred up a shroud of red-grey dust, but all that sunlight doesn’t give a shit. It shines straight on through the haze and almost lays me open, head to fucking toe. I cough a few times on my way from the car to the bald-headed gook in Ray-Bans waiting to usher me to my rendezvous with the Czech. However, the wasps do not take my cough as an opportunity to vacate my cranium, so maybe they’re here to stay. The gook pats me down, and then double checks with a security wand. When he’s sure I’m not packing anything more menacing than my phone, he leads me out of the flaying day and into merciful shadows and muted pools of halogen.