A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  Against the wall near the stereo and beanbag is a long stringed instrument, which Felix can only compare to a Chinese pipa only this is longer and has about twelve strings as opposed to four. It’s a beautiful cobalt blue with maroon tuning handles and an intricate symbol or character etched in a stone coin installed at the top of the neck. There’s a long Japanese flute next to it that looks ancient but carefully preserved.

  Every inch of exposed wall is covered with hanging, vertically parallel rods of dark, translucent Plexiglas. They have a strange quality but he can’t place what it is that bothers him about them.

  Felix steps toward the wall to his right to examine the rods. As he gets closer and studies them, he becomes disoriented. They are shiny but there is no reflection. Instead, he sees ghostly, dimly glowing images of what look like buildings and pathways and cherry trees filled with blossoms and all of this appears to be upside-down. He steps closer and his perspective shifts like it would if he were looking at something in reality. That’s not Plexiglas…

  The room fills with soft, bright light and Felix has to close his eyes. He looks back at Siobhán. She has taken the opaque shroud off the object in the corner which is a smoke-tinted glass orb containing the strong yet soothing light source.

  She says, “Sorry,” and covers it with a translucent shroud, which lowers the intensity and increases the soothing effect. Through this shroud, Felix can see that the orb is filled with white flower petals that glow intensely. Riiiiiight… totally normal.

  Without letting himself get too distracted by that, he looks back at the rods on the wall and lets his eyes adjust. He gathers that the strange town or city isn’t upside-down but it’s built into the underside of a huge, almost horizontal cliff overhang, which must have necessitated building downward from the surface. There are downward extending sets of watermills that supply each other like symbiotic generators. Here and there he sees old machines that resemble ancient diesel generators with big rotating wheels and they’re pumping out smoke and/or steam from pipes, bellow, and vents. Some of the lowest reaching buildings have small dirigibles with deflated and secured air bulbs and balloons moored on dock-like pathways. There are other skiff-like ships as well, which don’t have a visible means of floatation but rest at the docks just the same.

  Felix realizes he can’t see what all this is built over and steps closer to the wall. He looks down and sees rushing, crashing water as far in each direction as he can see, other than darkness in the distance and to his right which he guesses must be the rest of the cliff or mountain this place is built into. He tries to take it all in but the harder he examines it, the blurrier it gets.

  “It’s like a snapshot… of a memory I guess you could say,” Siobhán says behind him. He looks back at her, head full of questions…

  Then he notices the ceiling or rather what’s on it. Installed on or in the entire ceiling is a patchwork of hollow logs and glowing moss and flowers, which he realizes must have been the original light source. There are butterflies and translucent butterfly-like creatures hanging around on it and fluttering about or crawling across.

  Siobhán makes a high-pitched chirping sound and Felix hears movement in the ceiling maze or tunnels followed by a squeaking, tittering sound.

  An animal pops its head out of a dark opening Felix hadn’t seen in the tunnels and moss. It pulls itself back out of sight when it sees Felix.

  Siobhán keeps chirping and says, “Come on, Billie. He’s not so mean.” She stretches her hand up toward the hole.

  The creature cautiously peeks out and examines Felix from the safety of the hole. It decides to trust Siobhán and slowly crawls out of the hole, down her arm, and gently wraps itself around her neck and shoulder before pulling itself around and landing in her cradled arms.

  It resembles a marbled polecat but with larger dark blue eyes and rainbow speckled markings on its almost comically long body.

  Felix watches Siobhán stroke and tickle the long ferret thing and asks, “You’re not…”

  She looks up at him and raises her eyebrows in expectation.

  “You’re not just some punky goth girl that works at a fish store, are you?”

  Siobhán’s expression takes on a hint of pleading as she says, “Well… I do work at the fish store. Can the rest wait? I can’t tell you how much I could use a real vacation, Felix; from myself especially.”

  Felix balances his curiosity with mental images of burst open, eviscerated bodies and the horrible animal sounds Rudy made while being killed by one of those nasty, amorphous monsters. That combined with the pill high plateauing for the moment returns the twist to Felix’s stomach and the urgency to his mind.

  Felix says, “Okay. If it gets us on the road and in the air, I can let it wait. But we do have to–”

  “Go. Yeah, you mentioned that.”

  Siobhán kisses the head of the long, undeniably cute creature writhing in her arms and squeaking. She gently drops it to the floor and it crawls toward Felix. Near his feet, it starts arching its long back toward the butt and jumping back and forth on its back feet while making a little squeaky barking sound.

  “She’s harmless. Don’t let her scare you.”

  “I’ll try not to.” He looks around the apartment again and asks, “How do you keep this hidden? Like if you needed a plumber or the landlords needed to get in to check something?”

  “Oh, that’s a funny little thing I don’t mind telling. I own most of Chinatown, give or take. J-town too. Won my first chunks in a mahjong game years ago. On a lark I took up investing and real estate and for a while I owned the entirety of them. The squares would never know that what with all the fake names and laundering. In legend I am also several different Asian crime bosses. The things I do when I’m bored.” She chuckles. “Then I got bored with all that too and started letting it slide and squares have been re-acquiring little chunks here and there for a while.”

  Felix decides to let this go too in the interest of a timely escape from this crazy town.

  Siobhán says, “Okay. What to wear…”

  Felix’s face contorts and he’s about to protest but Siobhán extends her hand toward him and pantomimes like she’s zipping his mouth closed.

  She gently kicks off her brocade slipper shoes and nudges them toward the nearest wall into neat parallel. She strides toward what must be the bedroom in this smallish place. Felix follows and notices the nooks and crannies in the weird ceiling tunnels have delicate looking things strung between them, which get denser as they get closer to her bedroom. They appear to be folded pieces of gossamer-thin, almost see-through paper with different tints to them. Origami cranes. Well over a thousand.

  The ceiling and Billie tunnels inside the bedroom are almost covered with the hanging paper birds. In the spots where the cranes are less dense there are billiard ball sized smoke-tinted glass spheres dangling from thin wire which emit a soft light from one or two of the glowing petals in each. As Siobhán walks into the room, the spheres brighten in her path and fade back to normal behind her. They also brighten the subtle tints of the cranes.

  “Has your wish come true yet?” Felix asks in as calm a tone as he can even though he wants to grab her and yell that they don’t have time to shower and change clothes.

  “Oh, you know that one? If you’re around long enough, I might tell you. Although, I guess then it wouldn’t have come true.” Siobhán looks a little troubled after ruminating on what Felix has to assume is the truth of her response. Felix lets this go too and enters the bedroom but stands near the doorway out of respect. She takes another drag off her beedi then stubs it out in a glass ashtray on her dresser and tucks it behind her ear. For someone who seems to always have a re-burn behind her ear, she smells pretty great. Actually, maybe it’s because the beedis smell pretty good too, if I’m being honest.

  Instead of a normal bed or futon, Siobhán’s bedroom has a wide, luxuriously soft looking hammock-like rig from one wall to the other on gyroscopic mounts of so
me kind on each end about head-level on the wall. The hammock is thick and upholstered with the same dark, psychedelic swirl print material Siobhán’s jodhpurs were made of from the night they met and there’s also a comforter of the same and a black afghan over that. There’s an old mahogany dresser along the far wall and on top of that in arms reach of the hammock is a loose stack of the thin paper the cranes are folded from, a spool of thin wire, and a circular glass dish of tiny, shiny balls like BBs. Billie runs and jumps up into the hammock thing and squeaks at Felix like a guard, warning him to stay out of its luxurious softness.

  In the corner on the right near the door Felix sees a special easel with a mechanical supply and wrapping spools for working with vertical scroll paper. The paper is like dark blue vellum and there are painted images and vertical strips of characters in a bright orange ink or gouache around them which resemble Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters but have obvious differences and a flourish to them he’s never seen. It’s like if you sprinkled in some Arabic style and added in strips of organic bar code intermittently.

  Felix looks a little closer and sees that the painting in progress on this stretch of material is of a long creature amidst fluffy clouds which appears to be whipping back on itself to attack a tiny figure in the air which looks like a man wearing a wide sandogasa hat and pack and wielding a very long, curved sword. There is detail work in dark blue ink over the orange medium with touches of other colors within the shades of orange. Felix has never seen anything quite like this in the worlds of painting or illustration. There are hints of different Asian styles of brush and woodcut styles but there’s also a subtle influence of western impressionism. Almost like Monet or Degas interpreting Kuniyoshi or Hiroshige. Or vice versa… Honestly, it’s fascinating.

  Against the far wall on the other side of the hammock there’s a long, black, shallow table which is covered with a variety of religious idols and symbols. Guadalupes, crosses of many denominations, Stars of David, Ankhs, baqua, mini totem poles with leering animals, small statues from Chinese, Japanese, and Indian takes on Buddhism, necklaces, rings, stones, gems, crystals, etc. And, as Felix has come to expect recently, there are many symbols and figurines and small statues of things he has no experience with or knowledge of. Centered on the wall above this table is a large, intricate diagram on that same blue vellum with soft orange markings. It resembles the sixty-four-hexagram interaction chart Felix has seen in Audrey’s copy of the I-Ching, but this chart multiplies the number of symbols in its concentric rings by a few times that.

  Felix raises his eyebrows and whistles.

  Siobhán notices, chuckles, and says, “I like to think of those as my Assorted SaintsTM. I just figure, it’s not worth taking chances. Gamble enough and you learn the importance of hedging your bets when possible. And if I keep praying to everything I come across, maybe one of ‘em’ll grant that little wish.”

  “Plus this way you can divide the blame more evenly for all this nonsense.”

  “That works too.”

  Her atom bomb boots are against the wall under the idol table. She grabs them and sits on the edge of the hammock, swinging the side she’s not on up as she settles low into the edge. She pulls her jeans up and slides the boots on and laces them then pulls her jean legs back down and cuffs them at the end.

  “So where shall we go first, young suitor?”

  “First?” Felix asks.

  “I’ve been enjoying my boring little fish store, teacher life– Oh, that reminds me. Anyway, once I start traveling I don’t stop in one place for too long.” She picks up a crimson portable phone from the dresser next to the paper, which looks really out of place but not in a bad way Felix decides. She dials a number and enables it.

  “I only have like twelve hundred left in my savings–”

  Siobhán raises her finger and interrupts, “When you travel with me, money is not something you need to worry about.” Her eyes dart toward the side of her head the phone is on.

  “Hi, this is Charlotte Sonatina. I’m calling because I won’t be able to make it in for a while for direct instruction but I am interested in making a donation as recompense and to hold my position for the future… Mmhmm… Yes, will fifty be alright? …Thousand, dear. Giving you fifty dollars would be an insult.” She gestures a “What am I a cheap skate?” to Felix and he shrugs. “My assistant will contact you within the week. …You are most welcome. All I ask is that you keep doing good work. …Yes, goodbye.”

  She hangs up and replaces the phone. She starts separating her longer hair and dreads into two loose braids.

  “Okay, so where?”

  “Um, I was thinking Hawaii?”

  She initially cringes then considers before frowning a bit and finally smirks and nods in the affirmative. “You just want to see me in a bikini, right?”

  She finishes one braid then the other and takes two thin lengths of velvet cord from under the comforter on the hammock. Without paying it much mind, she ties each braid near the end with what looks like a small but complex nautical knot.

  “I’m messing around… Of course you do. Sure, Hawaii works to start. Pretty. Warm. Warm is a nice switch once in a while. Ooh… we could snorkel! Or surf even! I haven’t done either in ages. And how are we to travel?”

  Felix responds, “I figured we could just walk down the BART and take it to the airport.”

  “Sounds good. My bike is being worked on and my car is in Singapore, so that’s fine.”

  Siobhán stands up, letting the hammock swing some, and smoothly pulls her orange sweater off over her head as she crosses to a closet. She isn’t wearing a bra and her lovely natural breasts ease back down over her ribs as she lowers her arms. Her underarms are shaven but Felix guesses that’s more in service of showing off the beautiful tattoo coverage under there than any need she feels to gussy herself up for anyone else. Felix looks away.

  Dental surgery… Paper cut… Stubbed toe…

  None of that works so Felix distracts himself by thinking about what more he just saw of her tattoos. The sea monster men continue up her arms to just below her roughly yakuza style shoulders and he notices now that the creatures are pierced with swords, arrows, and lances and they’re dead or dying. The shoulder he can see has a circular crest, which contains three comma-like “tomoe” swirling around and through each other like a Borromean Rings. In the fat, round ends of the tomoe, three more smaller tomoe swirl without interconnection in an arrangement that Felix believes is called a mitsudomoe. It’s like three commas swirling around each other and just barely touching at each end.

  From the glimpses he got, the cherry and plum blossoms flow down between her… down her chest and flow around her lean but smooth belly back around the small of her back and start to curve back around on her other hip and descend like an otherworldly happy trail but his view terminates at the top of her jeans. The petals are most dense in and around the sleeves and back and become more of a loose pattern formation down her chest and abdomen. The flash he got of her back before he looked away was vague but the work looked exquisite and intricate. It’s a portrait of a something like an archipelago of islands largely covered in majestic city-state castles, with one near the chain’s center having the largest castle.

  Siobhán throws on a black “Alien Sex Fiend” t-shirt with sleeves cut off at the seams and a printed image of Nik Fiend with a 13 on his forehead, big nails in his noggin like Pinhead, and hands pressed together like he’s praying. She casually takes out a dark blue zip-up hoodie with a blueprint schematic printed on it and puts it on over the shirt, zipping it halfway.

  Felix shifts restlessly.

  She says, “What?”

  28

  Felix and Siobhán reach the base of the stairwell and enter the fish store from the dark rear section. Chinese pop music plays on a small tape player that has been placed on top of the closed record player. Mrs. Long is behind the counter and does her best to ignore them as they cruise toward the front door and out throu
gh it onto the sidewalk.

  Felix puts his Inuit snow goggle specs back on and opens his rainbow umbrella.

  Siobhán scoffs playfully and says, “You look so silly with those on.”

  “I’m not worried about it. Disguise is the idea.”

  “Yeah, those are pretty low profile. Very subtle.”

  Siobhán tucks her thick braids behind her neck and back and pulls the hood up over her head, letting it droop a bit over her forehead. This combined with a quick makeup job she did before finally leaving the apartment makes her look a little like the grim reaper.

  Dash of white powder rubbed in all over; softly darkened eye sockets and cheekbones; thin black strips vertical down her powder white lips all the way across which look a little like teeth in a skull. At the bottom-center of this is a metallic crimson lip ring she swapped out a shiny black one she had in before. The whole look is subtle enough that Felix can still make out her freckles and overall she’s still quite lovely, but her reflective contacts make the hint of ghoulish countenance look more pronounced as they reflect grey sky and pouring rain all around.

  She takes a pair of carmine red driving gloves with cut fingers out of her back pocket. As she’s pulling them on, Felix notices those little slivers of curved metal on the top and bottom of her left ring finger again. He also sees a thread of blue down the center of her short, matte black fingernails.

  Siobhán takes a black umbrella out of the brocade bag slung over one shoulder down to her other hip. She opens it, revealing blue sky and fluffy clouds on the bell interior and puts it over her head. Felix looks around as he opens his umbrella and starts up the hill toward Stockton.

  “What about you? Aren’t you a little worried about airport security? Looking like that, I mean.” Felix asks.

  Siobhán chuckles and says, “Not at all. Oh, I need to stop in Colma and pour one out on an old friend’s grave if you don’t mind. Tradition. It’s on the way out.”