They’ve never done this before and yet there is a rhythm, Verity at the camera and Jacob wrangling their subjects. The camera is not hard to use, though it is significantly harder to use well. Verity points the lens and keeps busy clicking whichever buttons seem least sour; the viewfinder is a kaleidoscope of pouting shrieks, so she concentrates on moulded plastic and the hum of energy at her fingertips. Around her, figures bustle and jostle and whine; she clicks, and hunches her shoulders, and lets time pass until she hears Jacob say her name again.
She shakes her head; she wants to say that she is not a photographer, but Jacob is bent over his computer screen and the woman in green is looking over his shoulder. The kids are playing tug of war with a stuffed pony, rolling against the pale blue of a hanging backdrop.
“These aren’t very good,” is the woman’s flat verdict.
Jacob shrugs. “You aren’t paying us,” he points out, cheerfully enough. “Vee, what do you think?”
Verity leaves the camera, rubbing her fingertips against her thighs, and walks to look at Jacob’s screen. She blinks the aura of red and gold away from her lashes and sees, first, that the woman is right: the images are ill-framed, brightly lit, blurry. Jacob scrolls through wild eyes, crooked teeth, a fuzzy close-up of the stuffed pony’s tail, until one image jumps razor-clear and Verity says, “There.”
It’s a photograph of the little girl, just turning her head; her hair is tufted gold. There’s a sparkle in her eye and a chip in her tooth. Her face is in the lower right corner of the picture; behind, her brother’s shadow plays on the wall. She looks as if she’s been caught by surprise.
The image sparks in Verity’s ribs. “That one.”
Jacob peers more closely, but the children’s mother scowls immediately. “It makes her chin look fat.”
Verity would protest, but Jacob has already done something to the image onscreen—a click of his mouse and something alters the girl’s bone structure, shifts light and contrast. It gives Verity a headache.
“That’s amazing!” gushes the woman.
Jacob is modest: “Thanks. I took a class in graphic design, once.”
A dark glide of motion tugs at Verity’s peripheral vision; she thinks it is the dog in the hallway, but when she looks over, it is gone, and Jacob is tapping at his keyboard while something flexes in the whining hum of the room. The morning light spills through the wooden slats of the blinds on the front window, illuminating the hardwood in bright tiger stripes.
“Okay, let me get these printed out for you, I think I have it working here—”
Verity and Jacob exchange her pleading glance for his quick grin, and she edges into the front hall while he is still talking; it takes only a moment to slip on her shoes and lift her jacket and a soft grey scarf from the coat rack near the landing. A moment later and she is out the door, sliding her hands into her pockets.
If the inside of the townhouse can be a well of confusion, marked by odd flurries of light and the snapping ozone of Jacob’s ranging hobbies, then the city, as always, is a tornado. Verity stops on the front step and closes her eyes until she can reconcile the clouds that passing traffic sends snaking across her vision, and the way the sun’s warmth smells of oil and cloves. Only when she finds her balance among the sounds of the street does she allow herself to look at the spreading leaves of the oak tree, which chime like bells and lightly sting her fingertips, or the slab of sidewalk that tastes of lint and soiled leather.
When the world resolves itself, the dog is waiting for her. It is a worn shred of shadow sitting patiently at the foot of the stairs, and yet it has a particular solidity, as though the earth might crumble and open beneath the weight of its feet. Verity feels the gravity pull of it, and she stills for a long breath before judging it safe to descend the steps. The dog remains sitting, its yellow eyes watching. It wags its tail once.
Verity tries to keep her gaze steady, but there’s a bird in the tree chirping a streak of mauve. Then the door has opened behind her and the two children are streaming out and down the stairs. The young boy’s squeals are a spike through her temple. The mother follows more sedately, hands clenched on her purse and an irritated sigh puffing her lips. She pays Verity no attention whatsoever.
“Puppy!” yells the girl. The black dog bares its teeth and she wisely detours in the opposite direction, her small feet barely wavering. She has been distracted by something crumpled and dry on the sidewalk, about ten feet away. Her brother follows. Verity just glimpses the sad remnants of a cracked dragon wing and a scaled, half-flattened tail.
“Neat!” crows the boy.
His sister runs back to the base of the spreading tree. “I need a stick,” she proclaims. “Need a stick. I wanna poke it.” She sets one hand against the bark of the tree’s trunk and stands on tiptoe, reaching up for the branches several feet above her head.
“What are you—oh, leave that alone.” The children’s mother finds her voice, stepping forward, her heels clicking on the steps and then the concrete until she can get a view of the sidewalk and the crushed form that has caught her son’s attention. “Don’t touch that, honey. It’s just a dead rat. It’s full of germs.” She ignores the dog, but she does cast a glare back over her shoulder at Verity. “Someone should keep the property cleaner.”
Verity swallows the taste of cactus thorns—she wants to say we have no rats—but when she opens her mouth, the woman has already moved on, grabbing the little boy’s hand and herding both children further down the block. Her arm is already waving as she hails a taxi.
When Verity looks back at the sidewalk, she doesn’t see wings anymore—only matted fur and the stiff wormy twig of a broken tail now naked and pink.
The dog has paced several feet away down the sidewalk, where it sits once more, waiting attentively.
“You want me to go with you,” she guesses slowly.
The dog waves its tail again.
“Where?”
The dog only cocks its head this time, one ear turning sideways.
Verity sees the world stretching jagged and uncertain before her; in the shadow-dog’s attention, she feels the pull of the magician’s gaze. In the maelstrom of the city, her balance shifts.
At her back is the familiar comfort of the townhouse—the careful spaces she would know blindfolded, the golden dust of the kitchen and the safety of Jacob’s flashing grin. She could turn and take five short steps to refuge.
On impulse, she draws a breath and turns slightly to the side, gesturing with her chin. “The, um, dead thing on the concrete,” she says. “What is it? Did you see a rat, too?”
She is, she realizes, standing on a city street, talking to a dog.
The dog looks at her. Then it wags its tail again, deliberately, and lets its black tongue spill out over its teeth.
It is, she thinks, laughing at her.
Verity sighs, and steps forward.
6
I read that Jacques Derrida liked an idea called sous ratûre, which means “under erasure”; he would write a word and then cross it out, to try and communicate that his thought was incomplete—that language was insufficient for clarity and he’d only used the best word he had under the circumstances. Did you know that?
yes and he was right but also if i used sous ratûre all the time everything i wrote would look like this i couldnt talk and it wouldnt be any clearer and you would be annoyed but i like that you read about derrida so thanks
you havent written about colin
We’re getting there.
OCTOBER
Verity follows the dog down her tree-lined Glebe avenue. She is not surprised when the shadow-creature turns on Bank Street, padding toward the old theatre. The city throws itself against her in whirls of scent and touch and taste, but the dog is a ripple of sable that waits patiently when she pauses.
Once, she ventures, “Where is your friend?,” but the dog only prances on jaunty feet, sliding a look sidelong. Its eyes are slitted now, like a snake’s. Verit
y thinks it looks amused.
The glitter taste of it sends a trickle of electricity down Verity’s throat, contrasting with the richly spiced scent of the graffiti on the wall of the stationery store just to her right. Swerving, she almost walks into a mailbox. When the dog presses itself against her thigh, she says, “Don’t,” but kindly, and rights herself, brushing her fingers against dented metal as they pass.
The dog stops outside McLuhan’s, as expected. Again, Verity is struck by the oddity of its shadow stretching across the pavement; she can discern no difference between the ink of its fur and the spill of darkness at its feet. It occurs to her that the dog is its own shadow. The thought gives her pause; she lets it melt over the back of her tongue and stares at the alien blot. It looks impatiently back at her with slitted golden eyes, and flattens an ear.
“Okay?” says Verity, helpfully. She looks over at the parade of ragged flyers plastered to the theatre’s windows, then steps to the door. Above her, the marquee letters still spell out ‘THE BETWEEN CANCELLED SOR Y.’
The front door pulls easily open. Verity pauses, the city looming familiar and cacophonous between her shoulder blades, then the dog slips past her in a wash of fur and she follows.
The papers plastered across the windows outside allow sunlight only in streaks and flutters cast across the threadbare red carpeting of the unlit lobby. Verity is cautious in new spaces; she lets the door close behind herself and waits until she can parse the dust singing lightly in her ears or the stale taste of abandoned brass trim. The lobby is shallow but wide, marked with faux Victorian columns where the paint has chipped to reveal plywood beneath. Against one such column, the magician leans, arms folded. The dog has gone to sit at his feet.
The magician asks, “What are you looking at?”
“Half an octave.”
“Hm.”
Verity notes that the collar of the magician’s faded black t-shirt sports a round pin identical to her own. The Between, like an empty space in the stone of his silhouette.
Verity considers several possible things to say, then ventures, “What’s your name?”
“Santiago,” he says, and adds a flick of his fingers. “This is Ouroboros. Ouro, if you like.” The dog seems larger now. Its narrow back is level with the magician’s hip.
“Hi. Why...?” Verity can’t think of a good way to end the question. It’s too big. She ends up gesturing vaguely around the lobby, then to herself.
“Someone asked for you. It’s—let’s call it unusual. She generally doesn’t ask for anything.”
“Who—”
But the magician makes another motion, a graceful gesture that flattens his palm in her direction.
Verity sighs. “I don’t need to stay here.”
“Need, no. But you want to know, don’t you? Everyone does.” The magician is watching Verity; it is the same look he gave her in the market, wary and a little perplexed. The dog’s head is canted at an identical angle, though it strikes Verity as friendlier. It might be the perky set of its ears.
“Not everyone,” corrects Verity, who shakes her head, warding off discomfort like a bee. “But I do. Um. Want. I think you are some of the things I’ve never understood, and so is your dog, and I want the answers like breathing.”
“And so?” Santiago raises an eyebrow, hands in his pockets. He withdraws the left, conjures three playing cards, and slides them away again before she can register more than the jack of clubs.
“So I think there are other ways. You gave them to me.” Verity touches the pin on her jacket collar, and looks deliberately at the matching logo pinned to the magician’s shirt. “Someone told me to say the second album is, um, better than the third.”
She doesn’t see his face change—there’s a burst of violet obstructing her view. She hears, instead, a rippling whisper of uncertainty in the air.
“That way’s slow going,” he says; she know it’s true because it tastes of mango, cool and sweet.
“A lot of things are, for me.” Verity rubs her hand over the back of her neck, beneath the unbrushed fall of her hair. The scarf she wears is soft and a little too warm. She feels the precipice, the wanting; she sees, also, the edge to the magician’s easy smile.
She is very alone inside the old theatre.
“You’re surprisingly blasé about this whole thing.” The magician’s observation is half a question, his tone bemused.
“People who know me will tell you,” says Verity, carefully, “that my world is a strange place.”
The dog’s eyes are gold and the magician’s are like sparkling coal. While Santiago studies her, Verity looks at the dog, which is staring back. Its tail fluffs out, then smoothes to a reptilian whip.
Santiago offers, “We’ve been watching you. We can’t figure it out. This company you work for—what do you do, exactly?”
Verity shrugs a shoulder. “We haven’t decided yet.”
“Hm.”
Before Verity can ask, the magician adds, “You’re interesting. But you’re not one of us.”
His words are mist to her; she shakes her head. “How do you know?”
“Your phone. I’m going to need that from you in a minute. Here—this way.”
Santiago peels himself off the pillar and steps to the side, the dog following, but the magician’s liquid motion fizzes in Verity’s ears, and she tosses her head. When he turns back, one eyebrow raised (the dog with one ear perked), she can only frown at him.
He walks toward her again, the dog following, and that’s when she sees the flicker-flow pattern of their steps across the sun-dappled carpet. “You have no shadow,” she says, but it doesn’t taste right, melding with the hint of gasoline on her tongue and Santiago’s flash of wicked grin. Ouro, simultaneously, shows its teeth.
Verity blinks. “The dog is your shadow.”
The magician’s grin grows a little wider, then abruptly thins. Verity sees the dog’s ears go back, and she thinks, it could be less easy. She wonders what he might do, this unknown man in a disused building where she is a little too far from help.
“This way,” he says, simply. He runs a hand through his curling hair, and strides to a narrow door on the side wall. EMPLOYEES ONLY, says the handwritten sign. The paper is yellowing and torn at the corners. Below, in smaller letters, it reads, NO CELL PHONES, NO CAMERAS, NO COMPUTERS. Someone else has added, in hurried red ink, NO PACEMAKERS.
“Is it about the band?” Verity is bemused. “The show is cancelled.”
“It’s always cancelled.”
Santiago opens the door and gestures Verity through. As she passes, she looks down at the dog, sitting now with its tail curled around its feet. It watches her before following her through.
Verity isn’t sure what to expect, but the broom closet is unimpressive. The room is maybe four feet by four feet, two walls lined with shelves that are mostly empty save for a cardboard box and half a bottle of bleach. Three candles are burning in glass jars on the far shelf, adding to what little light filters in from the open doorway.
“Phone,” says Santiago, and holds out his hand. Verity hesitates, but slitted yellow eyes stare up at her from the black streak that curls around the magician’s wrist, and she realizes the dog has slipped in as the snake. She stares at it for a long moment—the dog is a snake is a dog—then fishes her phone from her pocket and drops it into the magician’s outstretched palm.
He accepts with a disdainful wave of his fingers, conjuring the smooth piece of technology away and wiping his palm on the sleeve of his jacket. There’s a plastic bucket of water to the side of the door; liquid splashes the leg of Verity’s jeans and she glances down, startled, to see the rectangle of her cell phone settling to the bottom. She considers protesting, but it’s already too late, so she lets out a slow breath and turns. The closet is tight. She sets her back against the rear shelves and sees Santiago’s form silhouetted against the low light of the lobby before he shuts the door behind himself. The candlelight glitters, reflect
ed from his gaze.
“Close your eyes,” he says. When Verity hesitates again, he adds, “I’m not sure we can do this if you’re watching. I won’t hurt you.”
There’s grey in his words—the future, she thinks, foggy and undefined—but nothing that stabs at Verity’s skull, so she closes her eyes. It doesn’t make the little room less claustrophobic. She can still see the memory-echoes of candle flames and the swirling, deeper blackness of the magician’s presence. Verity breathes lilac and wonders about the snake.
Santiago takes her hand—lightly, but firmly, his skin hot and dry. The world shivers. She hears a door close behind her and wonders that she didn’t hear it open. Her hand is released and she stands alone in space that feels suddenly larger, air whispering around her. She hasn’t moved.
“You can open your eyes,” Santiago says, but she already has. Verity blinks and sees the lights of a hundred tiny flames—candles and lanterns both, spread out before her and stretching down the aged wooden planks that line the length of a seemingly endless hall. The hallway is only about six feet across but extends well into the darkness, and when she tilts her head back, she can find no ceiling, only wood-slatted walls going up and up into shadow, covered in patches of stucco and irregular splotches of brick. There’s a door in the wall behind her, tall and broad, carved of planks that are thick but cracking with age. The magician still has his hand on the knob.
Verity feels splinters in her lungs and the impossible weight of plaster and brick bisecting her flesh. In that instant, she cannot breathe; she feels gravity beating against her bones. Even as she gasps, the crush fades and she can discern only the dusty space of the hall and the impossible height above.
Santiago says, “This way.” When he touches her elbow, Verity flinches; his confidence is a frosted shroud. The air is hot. The magician curls his lip and then drops his left hand to his side; the whisper of snake-Ouro slides down his leg before it ripples larger and the dog presses lightly at Verity’s leg. When she touches its ruff, she finds it furred, neutral, barely solid. She only shakes her head and lets her hand rest on the shadow-beast’s back when she steps forward, uncertain of the floor beneath her feet.
In Veritas Page 5