“I didn’t know I could do it, either.” Nimble smiles. “But here I am.”
Millicent sits herself up, blankets falling from her shoulders. Her nightgown shines pale blue in the breath of moonlight that slides past the drapes. “Why are you here? Is something amiss?”
Nimble sits herself on Millicent’s bed and takes her friend’s small hands in her own. “There is someone I would very much like you to meet. A friend.”
“A friend?”
“Tub? Would you come in please?”
Something takes a hesitant step on the other side of the room, in the dark. Millicent wipes her eyes, trying to see past sleep. One more step brings it into the light.
It would have the form of a primitive fertility goddess—squat, round, nude, and heavy—if it weren’t male. Broad hands, thick arms, feet wide and fat with splayed toes. Little tufts of hair on the shoulders, a single, crazed tuft of hair sprouting diagonally above one of its bulbous ears. It looks out at Millicent from small, dark eyes made smaller beneath a drooping brow. Its mouth is as wide as its neckless head, and two tusks jut upward from behind a wet lower lip almost as if to hitch on the thing’s heavy eyebrows.
It raises a handful of stubby fingers and waves.
Millicent shrieks and tumbles backward out of bed.
“I…I’ll go,” it says, with a voice as thick and heavy as a tropical river.
In another room Mama murmurs and goes back to sleep.
Nimble raises a hand. “No, Tub, wait.” Nimble gets up from the bed and tippy-toes around to the other side, where Millicent is gathered in the corner, peering over the tops of her knees, past the bed, to the ogre by the window.
“Millicent,” Nimble says evenly. “This is Tub. Tub, this is Millicent. Millicent, Tub is a very good friend of your father’s.”
Millicent looks up at her friend. “Father?”
“Yes. Mr. Athelstane made Tub, just as he made me.”
On the other side of the room the thing waggles its fingers again. “Hello.”
Millicent stands up, straightens her nightgown, and looks from Nimble to Tub. “Please accept my apologies,” she says, uncertainly. “It was unkind of me to react as I did.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Tub says. “I’m not s’posed to be pretty.” And then he does a little dance.
For most of the night Nimble sits, and watches.
At the moment, Millicent and Tub are talking. They have been talking for a little while now. Tub has grabbed both feet and is rolling around the room.
“He lives all over the place,” Tub is saying, narrowly avoiding knocking over an oil lamp. “Just goes through the Drop. Just like me. Belize today, Sam Framcisco tomorrow, New Zealand the day after…” He rolls to a stop right in front of Millicent, chubby toes gripped in stubby fingers. “Nimble says you’re sad.”
Millicent shrugs weakly. “Mama is sad.”
“I would feel sad if I missed Dorian.”
Millicent nods again.
“But,” Tub continues, “I wouldn’t be sad.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not sad. You’re Millicent. Millicent with a sadness upon her.”
“Meaning…?”
Tub scratches his eyebrow, then pulls his bottom lip over his head.
“I think what Tub is saying,” Nimble suggests, “is that sadness comes and goes. Best not to think of yourself as actually being sadness.”
Tub nods, fiddling bashfully with his hands. Millicent giggles. Tub slides one corner of his lip over a tusk and peers out at her. “See?” he says.
“I am Millicent with a sadness upon me,” she says.
Tub rolls backward and comes up standing. His lower lip comes free with a wet flop.
“What does Father do,” she asks as Tub starts dancing again.
“Well,” Tub says, pumping his elbows as though walking briskly. “He likes learning all sorts of stuff.” With each movement his bulky rear end moves in counterpoint while his tongue edges out of the corner of his mouth with great concentration. “Other times…hmph…he stays up…hah…late and…hmph…sings a lot. With…ho…friends.” Every now and then he stops elbowing, juts out a foot and points to his toes with both hands, then goes back to elbowing and wiggling before pointing to the other foot. Repeat.
“What are you doing,” Millicent asks.
“The Dance of Victory,” Tub says humphing and hooing his way through it. Now he has turned around and is going through it all again for the benefit of the window. “I do it whenever Dorian figures something out.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s fun.”
Millicent gets to her feet and stands beside the little ogre.
“Hmph huh ho hey…”
After a minute she gets the steps down pat, and the two of them dance for the moon.
Dorian is in Manaus, and laughing. His arm is around a lady that Tub does not know. Dorian is very drunk. They are in a dingy little place. Tub wonders if maybe it’ll fall down soon. Tub is in the next room, watching Dorian and this lady he doesn’t know through a brown screen. The color reminds Tub of his river. He doesn’t like it when Dorian is drunk with other people. It’s different from when he’s drunk by himself.
“Go to New York First National,” his creator says to the sagging ceiling. “And grab a handful of Mexican Eagle silver dollars. Then get yourself over to Chengdu. Leave the money for Lei, along with this note—” Dorian drops a scrap of paper over his shoulder, behind the seat. “—then come back here with the opium.”
The woman giggles, says something Tub doesn’t understand.
“And make it quick,” Dorian says, leaning into her. “The night is aging.” Dorian kisses her, and the room goes quiet as they disappear below the seat. Tub makes his way in, retrieves the note, and pops back into the Drop.
Nimble is here, sitting on an earthen slab. Her face is ruby-lipped porcelain. Her body is art. Through her chest, past her heart, Tub can see the light of the torches she reads by. “Hello there,” she says, putting her book down.
“Hello,” Tub says. He wants to say something else, looks at his feet. “Millicent is nice.”
Nimble smiles, and Tub’s chest feels the way his feet do before a fire on a cold night.
“It was,” she says. “You are a remarkable person, Tub.”
And then his face feels the same way. “I…I have to get something. For Dorian.” He waddles over to one of the cold torches and lifts it from its bracket. He lights it on one of the burning ones. The pitch catches with a plume and crackle.
“Where are you off to now,” she asks, delicately.
“China,” Tub tells her. “But first I have to go to New York.”
“Millicent is at work now,” Nimble says. “But perhaps you would like to visit her with me? Later on?”
Tub smiles and looks down. “I would.”
“I look forward to it then,” Nimble says.
“All right,” Tub says. “’Bye, Nimble.”
“Good-bye, Tub.”
And then he is somewhere else.
The bank vault is very dark, and far colder than the Drop or Manaus. The walls and floor are chilly, and painted thickly with white. The torch blinds Tub to everything beyond the light it gives off. He raises it as high as he can, gets close to all the bags stored on all the steel and wire shelves.
“Mexican Eagles…,” he says to himself. “Mexican Eagles…”
After a few minutes he finds a white sack with the right symbol, and pulls the drawstring open. Inside are fat silver coins. Tub takes a handful, and then he is back in the Drop. He enters elsewhere, away from Nimble. He doesn’t know what he would say to her a second time.
“Tonight, though.” He nods to himself, resolute.
And then he is somewhere else.
The rain is coming down hard, clattering off the roof, sounding like an army beating bamboo; like an ocean’s worth is battering the small U-shaped house Tub has found himself in.
No one is in the room. There is a little wooden table here that only comes up to Tub’s knees. On the table is a heavy bell with a leaden knocker resting beside it. Outside, the ground is being churned to dancing mud. The trees bow and bob under the weight of the downpour. Tub can feel the rain misting in through the open door, the slatted windows. Tub takes Dorian’s note, and the handful of Mexican Eagles, and places them on the little table. Then he picks up the bell and bangs it as hard as he can. There is an exclamation from another part of the house. Tub hears footsteps, and then someone must have looked into the room because suddenly he is back in the Drop.
“Hello again, Tub. That was quick.” Nimble has put her book aside. She stands primly, feet together, hands clasped at her waist. Her head seems to float there, in space, atop the ornate scaffolding of her body, and again Tub feels himself suffuse with her presence. He burns up from within, brain split into fourths and each quarter arguing with the others about what to say to this vision before him.
“It wasn’t a big job,” he says. “I’ll have to go back in a minute.” He realizes he is still holding the bell and knocker.
“An arrangement of Mr. Athelstane’s?”
Tub nods. “China,” he says. “It’s very pretty. You might like it there.”
“I’m sure I would.”
“It’s very pretty. But I spend more time in my river.”
“You live in a river?”
Tub nods. “I’m not so heavy there. And everyone knows me.”
“Other people live in your river?”
Tub nods. “Otters, birds, turtles…they all know me.”
Nimble’s head inclines curiously, and she steps toward him. “I would very much like to see your river. And China.”
Tub looks up at her, and his tiny eyes widen. They are blue.
Tub returns to Dorian. The Englishman is seated at the table against the stained wall, one hand propping his head, the other around a grimy little glass of something brown.
“You’re late,” he says.
“Sorry,” Tub says, fidgeting nervously. “But I couldn’t get back into Lei’s.”
Dorian sighs and downs the last dregs of his glass. “So he tried watching the room, then. Nosy bugger wants to know how I do it.”
“I got your things, though,” Tub says, and puts a little sack onto the table.
Dorian opens it, looks inside, licks his pinkie finger, and dips it in. He sucks the off-yellow powder from it, smacks his lips, and draws the bag shut again. “Too late,” he says, and gestures to the mattress in the far corner. Dorian’s lady friend is laid out there, face to the wall, snoring loudly. Dorian sighs again, and despondently waggles the empty bottle. There’s something left in there, so he necks it. “No noise at least.” He goes still now, and then eyes the bag. He undoes it and has another taste.
Tub wants to make Dorian smile, but is afraid that if he speaks Dorian will hear the other words among his own. So he keeps it short.
“I met Millicent, Dorian. Nimble took me with her. She’s very nice.”
Dorian sighs to himself and very slowly and deliberately presses his hands to his ears.
“Sorry,” Tub says. “Sorry.”
“Tub,” his creator says amicably, through clenched teeth. “Be a sport and get a few things for me, would you?”
Nimble has ventured to some green part of the world, and fetched for Millicent a basket of wildflowers. She sits upon the ground, arranging them, awaiting Millicent’s return from work, when Tub appears before her. The smile upon her face evaporates like mist on a bright morning.
“Oh, Tub, whatever’s wrong?”
Tub cannot look her in the face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I…I told Dorian that we visited Millicent.”
Nimble stands and bends over him, placing her hands upon his heavy shoulders. The poor little thing is shaking. “Oh, Tub, can that be so very bad?”
Tub nods. “Dorian made me bring him some instruments…”
Nimble’s heart-box begins spinning faster. “Instruments?”
Tub nods. “He…he made sure I couldn’t ever speak of her to him again.” He jabs a thick finger against the side of his head, over and over again. “He made sure.”
Nimble says nothing, but seizes him in an instant, holds him close. “It’s all right,” she coos. “It’s all right now.” The top of his head is prickly against her cheek, and still Tub’s shoulders shudder.
“No,” he says. “No. It’s not all right. I’m sorry, Nimble. I’m sorry.”
Nimble raises her head.
Against the far wall, one shadow amid the stalactites’ shadows, Mr. Athelstane beckons to her with a curved finger. In his other hand is a piece of singing moonlight.
Clear water nudges the rushes. Tub is up to his broad waist in it, his jaw outthrust. A heron perches on his lower lip, dips its beak into his mouth, plucks out a struggling fish, and flaps away. Tub spits water sideways. “Do you think birds get cold,” Tub asks.
Nimble sits in the grass, beneath the broad shade of an old tree. Sunlight gleams amber upon her, here and there, as it falls through the branches.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I wouldn’t think so. They’re covered in feathers.”
“But birds are always covered in feathers.”
Nimble had knelt before Mister Athelstane, facing away, and felt dizzy as her creator mixed and messed within her head. When it was done there was no place in the same thought for Mr. Athelstane and talk of his daughter. She could no more grasp that notion than imagine an undiscovered color. And so it was with Tub, also.
Who is, at the moment, floating on his back and making quacking noises at a duck, turning clockwise as he slowly floats downstream.
It is at this moment that Nimble suspects she has a great deal more to learn about being alive.
Millicent stands alone in the sitting room, wearing a bonnet of black silk and a dress of black silk crêpe. Crêpe lisle—black—adorns her wrists. The leather furniture has been taken out and stored higgledy-piggledy in the kitchen. The sitting room is now packed with thick explosions of lilies and marigolds, stacked one atop the other, and multitudinous wreaths of the same. Atop those lies Papa’s coffin. On a small table by his head Mama has placed his wood plane and paint-brush. His shovel stands propped against the coffin at his feet.
Millicent sighs and fiddles with the crêpe at her wrists. “He was the only friend I had in this world,” she says. Mama is upstairs, and there is—can be—no one else in the house. Millicent feels Nimble take her hand, to a soft tune of hiss-and-click. Tub takes her other.
The years have seen Millicent grow, and she is almost a young lady. They still talk fancifully with one another, but lately Millicent has wanted to know more about the world beyond London. Nimble is resolved to show it to her, taking Millicent through the Drop if need be. In a year or two, she realizes, they will be looking at each other eye-to-eye.
“So this was Papa,” the ballerina says. “You were right, Millie. He has a lovely face.”
Millicent squeezes both their hands, draws them to her. “After the upset my growing up with two imaginary playmates has caused,” she confides. “If he is with us, then at this very moment Papa must be having the greatest laugh of his life.”
Silence. And then Tub sniggers and slaps a meaty hand over his mouth, and Nimble giggles and it’s on for young and old.
Millicent needs no encouragement. It is a fine farewell.
Words hide everywhere. Like battalions they arrange themselves into configurations of power and purpose. Cloaked in the world’s glossolalia they appear, only to you, and deliver their message.
Ceaselessly.
The sun rises, you obliterate your senses as best you are able, the sun sets, and you don’t stop.
This is life on the run from everything you’ve built.
Your compatriots are all dead. One by one they were felled; here by a bullet, there by a crust of bread, and another by an ill-timed streetcar. The finest wi
llworkers you’ve ever known, comparable indeed to yourself, reduced to meat and mud and memory by the whim of the hidden, banished, monstrous Aeon to whom you provided context.
You are such a fool.
Its instruments are yours, or so you believed. Unlike anything you’ve ever known they embody a beauty so profound it renders you morose. And what they have gifted you with…oh. Built from the bones of a murdered angel they veritably tremble and scream with what they have been robbed of, and what they have been so forcibly granted. Even now, walking north, the few you have chosen to carry with you sing to one another, to themselves, to Itself…a mad, butchered thing gifted with only slightly less power than God and too will-stripped to use it. Broken into pieces, the unifying aspect of their—Its—power is you. And what a life you thought you would be leading as a result.
Raised in a stone room, lightless and locked, brought out only to be smoked and gassed and prodded to provide prophecy for an endless parade of bankers and fishmongers and hags by a loveless mother with eyes of stone and breath that filtered through the shattered rubble of her mouth…you were one day given an inkling intended for you and you alone.
Something needed help. Something so very much stronger than Mother.
So one day you told her where fortune lay, and that special lie set you free…just as surely as it led her to a man with broken hands and the bottom of a very, very deep river.
It took four days for someone to find you. Mother kept you half starved at all times—it made the visions come stronger—and so by the time the cellar door unlocked you were all but dead.
But never once did you doubt that it would unlock.
A day of bed and broth and you were off. A mix of feral cunning and foreknowledge kept you safe and fed…but only just. In time, as you grew and your body changed, the visions faded and fled…but not what you had learned about people and their needs.
Living wasn’t high, but it was easy. You worked and buggered and stole, you wove lies as gifts for the moneyed in need, and every remaining hour was spent in the company of cracked souls as deviant as you but far less gifted. You never stopped searching, never stopped looking, never stopped feeling for pieces of life that felt right.
The Music of Razors Page 9