The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I was thinking we could go to the movies tonight,” she says, turning to face the mirror again.

  “Were you?” I ask her.

  “I was. There’s something showing at the Avon that I’d like to see, and I think tonight is the last night. This is Wednesday, right?”

  “I believe so,” I reply, but I have to think for a moment to be sure, to make it past the sight of her tail and the wetness between my thighs and the dregs of the dream and the smell of Narragansett Bay getting in through the open bedroom window. “Yes,” I say. “Today is Wednesday.”

  “We don’t have to go,” she says. “Not if you don’t want to. But I was thinking we could maybe get a bite to eat, maybe sushi, and make the early show. If your meeting doesn’t run too long. If there isn’t something afterwards that you have to do.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t think so. I should be done by five. By five-thirty at the latest.”

  Her tail twitches again, and then it swings from side to side several times, and once more I’m reminded of my grandfather’s milk cows. It doesn’t seem at all like a flattering comparison, and so I try to remember what other sort of animals have tails like that, long tails with a tuft right at the end. But I’m unable to think of any others except cows.

  “Are you feeling well?” she asks, watching me from the mirror, and I catch the faintest glimmer of worry in her green-grey eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I reply. “I had a strange dream, that’s all. One I’m having a little trouble shaking off.” And I almost add, I had a dream that you were a woman who didn’t have a tail, and that I lived in a world where women don’t, as a rule, have tails.

  “My mother used to call that being dreamsick,” says Hana, “when you wake up from a dream, but it stays with you for a long time afterwards, and you have trouble thinking about anything else, almost like you’re still asleep and dreaming.”

  “I’m fine,” I tell her again.

  “You look a little pale, that’s all.”

  “I never get any sun. You know, I read somewhere online that ninety percent of Americans suffer from vitamin D deficiency because they don’t get enough sun, because they spend too little time out of doors.”

  “We should go to the shore this weekend,” she says. “I know you hate the summer people, but we should go, anyway.”

  “Maybe we’ll do that,” I tell her, and then Hana smiles, and she leaves me alone in the bedroom and goes to take her shower.

  2.

  As it happens, we don’t go for sushi, because by the time I’m done with work and make it back to our apartment on Wood Street, Hana has read something somewhere about people in the Mekong Delta dying at an alarming rate from ingesting liver flukes from raw fish. I can’t really blame her for losing interest in sushi after that. Instead, we go to an Indian place on Thayer, only a block from the theater, and we share curried goat and saag paneer with ice water and icy bottles of Kingfisher lager. While we’re eating, it begins to rain, and neither one of us has brought an umbrella. We each make do with half the Providence Journal. The newsprint runs and stains our fingers and stains our clothes and leaves a lead-blue streak on the left side of Hana’s face that I wipe away with spit and the pad of my left index finger. The theater lobby is bright and warm and smells pleasantly of popcorn, and standing there while Hana buys our tickets it occurs to me that most of the day and part of the evening have gone by without me thinking about Hana’s tail.

  “Would you like something?” she asks, looking back at me, then pointing at the rows of overpriced candy behind glass.

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine. I think I ate too much back at the restaurant.”

  “Suit yourself,” she says, and then she asks the boy working the concessions for a box of Good & Plenty and a large Dr Pepper.

  For just a moment, it seems that I must only have imagined that business with Hana’s tail. It seems I must surely have awakened from an uneasy dream, which I have since almost entirely forgotten, and being only half awake—half awake at best, my head still mired half in the dream—I saw a tail where there was not actually a tail to see. And here in the theater lobby, my belly full and my hair damp from a summer rain, it seems a far more reasonable explanation than the alternative, that my girlfriend has a tail. I look at her tight jeans, and there’s plainly no room in there for the tail that I thought I saw, the tail that reminded me so much of the tails of my grandfather’s cows.

  Hana pays for her soft drink and for the candy, and I follow her out of the bright lobby and into the dimly lit auditorium. The Avon is an old theater, and it has the smell of an old theater, that peculiar, distinctive blend of sweet and musty and very faintly sour that I can’t recall ever having smelled anywhere else but old movie theaters. It’s a smell of dust and fermentation, an odor that simultaneously comforts me and makes me think someone could probably do a better job of keeping the floors and the seats clean. But when a theater has been in continuous operation since 1936, like this one has, well, that’s more than eighty years of spilled cola and fingers greasy from popcorn and Milk Duds getting dropped and ground into the carpet in the darkness when no one can clearly see where they’re putting their feet. We take our seats, not too near the screen and not too far away, and it occurs to me for the first time that I don’t actually know what we’ve come to see.

  “I think you’ll like it,” Hana says, peeling the cellophane off her box of Good & Plenty. She drops the plastic wrap onto the floor. In the past, I’ve asked her please not to do that, but she only pointed out that someone gets paid to pick it back up again and then she did it, anyway.

  “I don’t even know the title,” I say, wondering if she told me, and I just can’t remember that she told me. “I don’t know the director.”

  “It’s German,” Hana says. “Well, I mean the director is German, and I think some of the funding came from Deutscher Filmförderfonds, and it’s set in the Black Mountains, but it’s actually an English language film. I think you’ll like it. I think it did well at Cannes and Sundance.” But she doesn’t tell me the title. She doesn’t tell me the name of the director. I try to recall walking towards the theater from the Indian restaurant and looking up to see what was on the theater’s marquee, but I can’t. Not clearly, anyway. I rub at my eyes a moment, and Hana asks me if I’m getting a headache.

  “No,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to remember something. My memory’s for shit today.” I don’t tell her that I’m wondering if forty-four is too young to be displaying symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s.

  There are a few other people in the theater with us. Not many, but a few. I hadn’t expected a crowd. After all, it’s a rainy Wednesday night. No one is sitting very near us. Some of the people are staring at their phones, their faces underlit by liquid-crystal touchscreen glow. Here and there, others whisper to one another in the way that people whisper in theaters and libraries and meeting halls and other places where you’ve been taught since childhood to keep your voice down. I stare across the tops of the rows of seats dividing us from the small stage and the tall red curtain concealing the screen. Hana takes a pink Good & Plenty from the box, and she offers it to me.

  “No, I’m fine,” I say.

  “Woolgathering,” she says, and I say, “A penny for your thoughts,” and she says, “No, I asked first.” Then she puts the candy-coated licorice into her mouth and chews and waits for whatever it is she thinks that I’m supposed to say.

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  “It’s something,” she replies. “I can tell by the lines at the corners of your eyes and that little wrinkle on your forehead.”

  I’m trying to come up with something to tell her that isn’t This morning, I saw your tail, or at least I think I saw your tail, when I’m rescued by the curtains parting and the screen flickering to life, by giant boxes of cartoon popcorn and cartoon chocolate bars and a cartoon hot dog marching by and singing “Let’s All Go to the Lobby.”

  “Isn’t there a
word for that?” Hana asks me, shaking out a couple more Good & Plentys into her palm.

  “A word for what?”

  “For anthropomorphized food that wants you to eat it. Like there’s a word for buildings in the shape of whatever’s being sold there.”

  “I didn’t know there was a word for that,” I reply.

  “Mimetic architecture,” she says. “I remember that from an advertising and mass media class I had in college. And I thought there was also a word for food that wants you to eat it. You know, like Charlie the Tuna. Like that,” she says and points at the screen.

  “If there is, I don’t think that I’ve ever heard it.”

  And then the ad for the concession stand ends and the first trailer starts, and it occurs to me that I have to piss rather urgently. I should have done it before I sat down, but I was probably too busy trying to decide whether or not I truly did see Hana’s tail that morning. The first trailer is for some sort of science-fiction comedy about a grumpy old man and a wise-cracking robot driving across America, and I tell Hana that I’ll be right back.

  “You should have gone before we got our seats,” she says. “Hurry, or you’ll miss the beginning. I hate when you miss the beginnings of things.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell her again. “I won’t miss the beginning. I promise.”

  “You say that,” and she reminds me how, last spring, I missed the first ten minutes of Auntie Mame when it was screened at RISD, and how I missed even more of the start of the last Quentin Tarantino film, even though we’d gotten tickets to a special 70mm screening. And then she tells me to go on, but not to dawdle and not to decide I need to go outside for a cigarette. I assure her that I won’t do either, and I get up and leave her sitting there.

  3.

  At the back of the auditorium, there’s a very narrow flight of stairs that leads up to a tiny landing and to an antique candy machine and two restroom doors, Gents and Ladies, and to the door of the projection booth. The candy machine is the sort that was already becoming uncommon when I was a little kid, the sort that takes a quarter or two and you pull a knob and out comes your Hershey Bar or whatever you’ve selected. The machine is now undoubtedly a museum piece, and even though there’s no out of order sign on it and the coin slot hasn’t been taped over, I can’t believe the thing actually works. I’ve never tested it to find out. The candy wrappers lined up neatly inside look dusty, their colors faded, but maybe it’s just that the glass display window has grown cloudy over the decades. Maybe it’s only an illusion, and the candy is restocked every day or so.

  And then I think about Hana telling me to please hurry and not to dawdle, and so I push open the door marked ladies and the old theater smell is immediately replaced with an old theater restroom smell, which isn’t all that different from the smell of most public restrooms, at least the ones that are kept reasonably clean and have been around for a while. The women’s restroom is so small that I can imagine a claustrophobic preferring to piss themselves rather than spend any time at all in here, certainly not as much time as would be necessary to relieve oneself. There are two stalls, though there’s hardly room enough for one, and the walls are painted a color that can’t seem to decide whether to be beige or some muddy shade of yellow. The floor is covered in a mosaic of tiny black and white ceramic hexagonal tiles.

  Just inside the door, there’s a mirror so large it seems entirely out of proportion with so small a room, and I pause and squint back at myself. There’s a smudge of newsprint on my chin that Hana hadn’t bothered to tell me about, and I rub at it until it’s mostly not there anymore. And then, staring at my reflection, I think of watching Hana’s reflection in our bedroom vanity mirror that morning, and I think of her tail, and I wonder if maybe it was only some trick of the late morning light. I also wonder what she’d have said if I’d had the nerve to just come right out and ask her about it:

  “How is it you’ve never before mentioned that you have a tail?”

  “How is it that you’ve never noticed?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. Maybe it wasn’t there until now.”

  “Or maybe whenever you’re fucking me, you’re too busy thinking about fucking someone else to pay that much attention. One of your exes, maybe. The one who went away to Seattle to go to clown school, for example.”

  “It wasn’t Seattle, it was Portland.”

  “Like there’s a difference. And who does that, anyway? What sort of grown-up adult woman quits her job and leaves her girlfriend to run off and join the circus?”

  “Well, even if that were true—and it most certainly isn’t—no matter who I might have been fantasizing about all those times, I think I wouldn’t have been so consistently and completely distracted that I would have failed to notice that you have a tail.”

  “Sure. You say that. But remember when I stopped shaving under my arms, and it took you a month to even notice?”

  I suspect it would have gone like that, or it would have gone worse.

  There’s no one else in the restroom, so I have my choice of the two stalls, and I choose the one nearest to the door, which also happens to be slightly larger than the one farthest from the door. I go in, latch it, pull down my pants, and sit there counting the hexagonal tiles at my feet while I piss and try to remember the name of the movie we’ve come to see on this rainy Wednesday night, because at least if I’m doing that, if my mind is occupied, maybe I won’t be thinking about Hana’s tail. I’m just about to tear off a piece of the stiff and scratchy toilet paper from the roll on the wall, when I hear a bird. And not just any bird, but what I am fairly certain is the cawing of a raven. Or at least a crow. My first thought is that I’d never before noticed how clearly sound carries through the floor up from the theater auditorium below, and my second thought is that, were that the case, that I was only hearing a raven from one of the movie trailers, I ought to be hearing other things, as well.

  Sound can do funny things, I think. And then I think, For that matter, so can morning light and shadow in a bedroom when you’re still groggy from a dream and from sex. Neither strikes me as a very convincing explanation.

  I hear the bird again, and this time I’m quite sure that I’m not hearing a recorded snippet of film soundtrack, not Dolby stereo, but something that is alive and there in the room with me. I wipe and get to my feet, pull up my pants, and then hesitate, one hand on the stall door’s latch and the other on the handle. My heart is beating a little too fast and my mouth has gone dry and cottony. I want a cigarette, and I want to be back downstairs with Hana. I realize that I haven’t flushed. I’m about to turn around and do just that, when there’s another sound, a dry, rustling, fluttering sort of a sound that might be wings or might be something else altogether. And suddenly I feel very goddamn stupid, like I’m five years old and afraid to step on a crack or walk under a ladder or something like that. I take a deep breath, and I open the door. And I see that there’s a huge black bird watching me from the mirror, standing on the floor, the floor in the looking-glass version of the Avon’s women’s room, glaring up at me with beady golden eyes. It looks angry, that bird. It looks dangerous. It occurs to me that I never had realized just how big ravens are. This one’s as big as a tomcat, a very big tomcat, and it hops towards me, and I take a step backwards and bump into the stall. Then I look down and realize that there’s no corresponding bird standing on the floor in front of me to be casting the reflection, and when I look back up at the mirror again, there’s no bird there either.

  I think again about early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

  And then I flush the toilet and wash my hands with gritty pink powder and go back downstairs.

  4.

  By the time I get back downstairs, the feature has already started, and despite the bird in the mirror and the very real concern that I may be rapidly losing my mind, that I may have lost it already, I’m mostly worrying about how annoyed with me Hana’s going to be. “Just like Auntie Mame,” she’ll say. �
��Just like The Hateful Eight all over again.” And it’s not as if I can use the phantom raven as an excuse. Well, I could, but I know myself well enough to know that I won’t. So long as I keep these visions or hallucinations or illusions to myself, they will seem somehow less solid, less real, less tangible. The moment I cast them into language and share them with someone else any possibility that I can simply put it all behind me and get on with my life and have, for example, a perfectly ordinary Thursday, goes right out the window. The movie we’ve come to see, whatever its title, is in black and white.

  I don’t immediately return to my seat and to Hana. Instead, I stand behind the back row, where no one happens to be sitting, and I watch the movie. Up on the screen there is a forest primeval rendered in infinite shades of grey, dominated by towering pines and spruces that rise up towards an all but unseen night sky, a forest that seems to have been tasked with the unenviable job of keeping Heaven from sagging and crushing Earth flat. Winding its way between the trees there’s a brook, the surface glinting faintly in the stingy bit of moonlight leaking down through the boughs, and bordering the brook are boulders and the broken trunks of trees that have fallen and are now quietly rotting away. Here and there, a log fords the brook. There’s the sound of wind and calls of night birds. And in the distance, there’s a bright flicker, like a campfire.

  I’m reminded of two things, almost simultaneously, as near to simultaneously as anyone may have two distinct and independent thoughts. I am reminded of the illustrations of Gustave Doré and of the dream that I woke from just that morning, my own half-forgotten dream of a forested place, the dream I immediately tried to lose in sex. I feel the pricking of gooseflesh up and down my arms and legs, and I shiver, and I hug myself as if a sudden draft has blown by, as if maybe I’m standing directly beneath an air-conditioning vent. I think, You don’t have to watch this, whatever this is. You can turn and walk out into the lobby and wait there until it’s over or until Hana comes looking for you, whichever happens first. And then I tell myself how very silly I’m being, that coincidences occur, that they are inevitable aspects of reality, and how that’s all this is, a coincidence. At most, it might be chalked up to an instance of synchronicity, a coincidence rendered meaningful only by my subjective emotional reaction and entirely devoid of any causal relationship or connection between my dream and the film, much less any connection with the raven in the restroom or with Hana’s tail, both of which I likely only imagined, anyway. This is what I tell myself, and it does nothing at all to dispel my uneasiness and the cliché chill along my spine and down in my gut.