“I don’t know. We never read the placards, you see. It was so much more interesting to make up stories in our heads.”
Their eyes met again, as brief as a blow, and then the taxonomist nodded and spoke: “This is Draco campestris, the common field dragon. This specimen is an adult male—you can tell because his wings are fully fledged. He is thirty feet long from snout to tail-tip and would probably have weighed well in excess of three tons. The wings are merely decorative, you understand, primarily used for display in mating rituals. The only dragon which can fly is Draco nubis, the cloud dragon, which is hollow boned—and much smaller than campestris in any event. Contrary to popular belief, campestris does not breathe fire. That would be vulcanis,” he pointed at the magnificent specimen which dominated the Salle, “which must breathe fire because it would otherwise be unable to move fast enough to catch its prey.”
“Yes,” the lady murmured. “It is very large.”
“Campestris, like the other dragons, is warm-blooded. They are egg-layers, but when the kits hatch, the mother nurses them. It is very rare for there to be more than two kits in a campestris clutch, and the sows are only fertile once every seven years. Even before that Arc was lost, sightings of them were very rare.”
“Yes,” the lady said sadly. “Thank you.”
He took a step, almost as if he were being dragged forward by some greater force. “Was there something else you wanted to know?”
“No. No, thank you. You have been very kind.” She glanced over her shoulder at the doors of the Salle, where the men in suits still waited. She sighed, with a tiny grimace, then straightened her shoulders and defiantly extended her hand.
The taxonomist’s startle was overt, but the lady neither flinched nor wavered. Slowly, gingerly, he took her hand. He would have bent to kiss it, if she would have allowed him, but her grip was uncompromising, and they shook hands like colleagues, or strangers meeting for the first time.
Then she released him, gave him a smile that did not reach the fear and desolation in her eyes, and turned away, walking down the Salle toward the men who waited for her.
The taxonomist stood and watched her go, as unmoving as the long-dead creatures around him.
At the door she paused, looking back, not at him, but at the great skeleton towering over him. Then one of the men in suits touched her arm and said something in a low voice. She nodded and was gone.
x.
Even the Museum cannot preserve everything, though it is not for want of trying. The Director is vexed by this, perceiving it as a failing; tithe-children and curators are allied in an unspoken conspiracy, tidying the riddles and fragments out of her way on her stately progresses through the departments and salles of the Museum.
But always, when she has gone, the riddles come out again, for scholars love nothing more than a puzzle, and the tithe-children have the gentle persistent curiosity of Felis silvestris catus, as that species is classified in those arcs to which it is native, or to which it has been imported. It is as close as they come, curators and tithe-children, to having conversations, these attempts to solve the mysteries left by the receding tides of history and cataclysm:
A fragment of a ballad from Arc ψ19: The Dragon Tintantophel, the engine of Malice chosen . . . But Arc ψ19 has been lost for centuries, and no one from that array has ever heard of Tintantophel.
A pair of embroidery scissors, sent to the Museum by one of its accredited buyers in Arc ρ29 with a note saying provenance to follow. But the buyer was killed in the crash of the great airship Helen d’Annunzio, and the provenance was never discovered.
Two phalanges from the hand of a child, bound into a reliquary of gold wire. This object was found in one of the Museum’s sublevels, with no tag, no number, no reference to be found anywhere in the vast catalogues.
And others and others. For entropy is insidious, and even the Museum’s doors cannot bar it.
xi.
The tithe-child said in its soft, respectful voice, “I saw in the papers today that the Lady Archangel was beheaded last week.”
The taxonomist’s face did not change, but his hands flinched; he nearly dropped the tiny D. nubis wing-bone that he was wiring into place.
“They say she came to the Museum last week. Did you see her, mynheer?” There might have been malice in the great pale eyes of the watching tithe-children; the taxonomist did not look.
“Yes,” he said, the words grating and harsh, like the cry of wounded animal. “I saw her.”
Then the taxonomist did dream, the tithe-children saw, and they did not speak to him of the Lady Archangel again.
xii.
You who visit the Museum, you will not see them. They are not the tour guides or the experts who give informative talks or the pretty girls in the gift shops who wrap your packages and wish you safe journey. They are the tithe-children. Their eyes are large, pale and blinking, the color of dust. Their skin is dark, dark as the shadows in which they live. The scholars who study at the Museum quickly learn not to meet their eyes.
They might have been human once, but they are no longer.
They belong to the Museum, just as the dragons do.
Queen of Swords
Her predecessors’ portraits hang in the antechamber of her bedroom. “A reminder,” the king says. There is space for her portrait to hang beside them.
The ghosts come to her for the first time on her wedding night, after the sated king has departed for his own chamber.
They call her sister.
They stand just inside the doorway, Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel, each wearing a wedding gown as sumptuous as that which hangs now in the new queen’s wardrobe, each cradling her own severed head in her bloodstained hands, and they call her sister.
They whisper to her in voices like the tapping of branches at the window. They tell her she is beautiful, as they were; they tell her that she will recognize her own successor merely by the light in the king’s eyes. They tell her not to be jealous, not to be afraid. They tell her they will welcome her gladly to their company. The queen imagines standing next to Queen Isobel, the weight of her own head in her hands. She imagines calling her successor sister and shivers.
The dead queens appear after each of the king’s conjugal visits. They drift closer and closer as the weeks go by, trading bits of their unceasing threnody back and forth. Once, she tries to speak to them, but they will not break their chain of words to answer.
In the fourth month of her marriage, the new queen and her physicians determine that she is pregnant. The king is delighted. “I thought I was cursed to marry only barren women,” he tells her that night, his weight pinning her to the bed. He expects no response, and she offers none.
Later, alone, she waits, heavy with guilt. She has succeeded where Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel failed. They called her sister, and she has betrayed them.
But the dead queens do not come, and eventually she sleeps.
She wakes in the middle of the night. Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel are standing at the foot of her bed.
“He will have an heir.”
“The murderer—”
“—our murderer—”
“—will have an heir.”
“Our sister will grow heavy with his child.”
They start toward the new queen, one on each side of the bed.
“She will bear his child.”
“She will not be our sister.”
“She will be his.”
“His forever.”
The ghostly queens stand beside the bed, close enough to touch. The new queen grips her hands together, her knuckles turning white.
“She is not his.”
“She is ours.”
“Ours.”
“She is our sister.”
“He will not have her—”
“—will not keep her—”
“—we will not let him.”
“Please,” the new queen whispers. “Please let me be.”
One month later, the king begins to look for his fourth wife.
Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day
1.
It is early morning, barely dawn. It rained all night, and it will be raining again soon. The air tastes green and fresh and heavy. The park is deserted. I walk along the path, carrying the teddy bear in my left hand, as if it were something as normal as a newspaper. Somewhere ahead of me, the Wall is waiting.
2.
It was July and raining; there was a thunderstorm working up. You’d been dead for three months. I was in my room; I was reading. One of the guys who had served with you came to your funeral. I can’t even remember his name, but he’d had both his legs amputated at the knee, and he was in a wheelchair. He was the only person who talked to me like I was old enough to understand what was going on. He gave me All Quiet on the Western Front and said, “This is about what happened to your brother and what happened to me.” I read it that night, and then I read it again, and then I went to the library, and I started reading like it was life. I read everything I could get my hands on, including a lot of stuff the librarians didn’t think a thirteen year old kid should be reading. But everybody in town knew about Dad, and Mom just said, “It’s educational, ain’t it?” and hung up the phone.
That day I was reading A Separate Peace, lying on my bed with a headache throbbing in my eyes. It’d be another two years before anybody figured out I needed glasses. But the headache was all right; it was like the book and like what was happening in my mind. I heard a crash through the wall, from your room, a crash that felt like the Last Trump. I lay there for a moment, my tongue thick in my mouth and my heart banging in my chest, and then I got up and went out into the hall.
Your door was open; it hadn’t been open since you’d gotten on the plane in Knoxville. I looked in. Mom was on her knees, leaning into your closet, throwing things into a big cardboard box. The crash had been your track trophy missing the box and breaking against the floor. The little running figure that had been on top of it was halfway across the room, lying hard and cold and helpless between the bed and the hall door, as if he’d been struck down trying to escape.
“Mom?” I said.
She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes, I’m throwing out all his things. I refuse to have a goddamn shrine in my house for the rest of my life.” The glare she gave me was like a dog getting ready to bite. She wasn’t crying; she wasn’t anywhere close to crying. I knew she’d broken your trophy on purpose.
“Mom, shouldn’t you—”
“Get out,” she said.
I stood there, the book still in my hand, one finger still marking my place. I stared at her.
“Didn’t you hear me? Get out!”
I went back to my room and closed the door. The thunder started about ten minutes later, and for a while it was like there was another war on, between Mom and the thunder. Everything of yours that was breakable, she broke.
She dragged the cardboard box out to the curb in the rain, and then another one, and then another. And then she went into the kitchen and started dinner. We both knew Dad wouldn’t be home until midnight or maybe later, and he’d be drunk. So it was just Mom and me, and she’d make dinner, and we’d eat it, and then we’d each go into our own room and die by inches. I don’t know what Mom did in her room; I never did know. She had let you go in there sometimes, but you had never told me what you all talked about. I’d thought I could ask you later, when I was older.
3.
Veterans’ Day is November eleventh. That’s a bad day at work. Even my patients are restless, and the other wards are hell, where there are people who can follow a calendar and who understand that this should be their day. It isn’t their day, and they know it. Nothing we do can make it their day. Nothing anyone can do can make it their day ever again.
You died on April twenty-second. I can take a day of vacation then, and I always do. I tell everyone that I’m going home to see Mom and Dad, and that always works. They know about you a little bit; I keep having to explain to people why I work where I do, as if intelligence ought to exempt me from trying to help those still trapped in the wreckage.
I lie, of course, when I say I’m going home. I haven’t been back there since I went to college, except for funerals. Dad’s luck finally ran out the year after I graduated. He went off the road in his Ford late one night, dead drunk as usual. The car hit a telephone pole, and by the time the ambulance got there, he was just dead. I think I’d been expecting it to happen since he showed up drunk for your memorial service. Mom and I didn’t speak to each other at Dad’s funeral; she looked straight through me and defied me to remind her that I, too, was her son. I returned the favor.
4.
I dreamed of you again two nights ago.
5.
The Wall is black. It’s not the color of a scar, but that’s what it is: psychic scar tissue made visible, tangible, cold and hard and real. There is no way to describe the action of the Wall against the ground. Its black, silent presence is verbless; it is the place for people who do not have verbs. The blackness of the Wall eats action as the blackness of a black hole eats light.
6.
You volunteered for Vietnam. You were eighteen; you didn’t know any better. I was twelve; I knew even less. I thought anything you did was right by definition. In my experience you had never done anything wrong. You knew Communists were evil, and there was a great hunger in you to do battle with darkness and sin. You never got to read The Lord of the Rings; you were not warned about the price of victory, even for the good and pure of heart.
7.
In the VA hospital, there is a lounge with a long bank of windows. On sunny days when we wheel our patients in, we try to put them where they’ll be able to feel the sunlight as long as possible. Even plants respond to sunlight.
8.
Mom didn’t care if I read at the table; it saved her from having to talk to me. I sat there with my book and turned pages, because it was good camouflage, but I wasn’t reading. All I could think of was your things out there in the rain in those boxes, and how the scavengers would start coming by tomorrow, and they’d take away anything that looked worthwhile, and then the garbage men would take the rest, and that’d be it. Nobody who knew you would have anything of yours, and the people who had your things wouldn’t care at all about who they’d belonged to. I thought about the rain hitting the pages of your books. She’d ripped all your paperbacks in half before she threw them in the boxes; I’d seen the pages sliding out of the box and falling around her in the rain. I thought about the paper puckering and the words blurring and dissolving, and when I remembered to, I turned a page in A Separate Peace. Mom ate like some kind of machine, her hands and jaws moving, her eyes blank and fixed, like they were made of glass and filled with mercury. If you broke them, her tears would poison you.
9.
The names on the Wall do not accuse, or even stare. It would be better if they did. Statues would be easier against the conscience. Statues can look back at an observer, or even simply look at each other. They can give, however fleetingly, the impression that death is not lonely. The names are simply signifiers that have nothing left to signify. They are unforgiving because there is nothing left in them that can forgive.
10.
I dream of you in Vietnam, although I have never been there. I dream of you in the jungles and the heat, dream of you cutting your way through greenness turned hostile, dangerous, alien. I dream of you with the other soldiers in your unit; sometimes the man who came to your funeral is there, but I always dream of him in his wheelchair, the stumps of his legs covered by a quilt in the pattern called the Delectable Mountains. In my dreams, you talk to them and laugh, but I can never hear your voice.
11.<
br />
Usually what I do on my Veteran’s Day—your Veteran’s Day—is go to the local cemetery. It’s an old place, full of silence. I look at the gravestones of the soldiers who are buried there; I read their dates and think about yours. I remember the fantasies I used to have, that you were still alive, a POW or a monk in Tibet or wilder, even more impossible things. In my dreams, you were always dead, beyond the reach of fairytales, but lying awake, staring at the night outside my window, I told myself stories, and I still don’t know if they made things better or worse.
12.
After dinner, we washed the dishes. We didn’t say anything; we didn’t need to. Then Mom went into her room and slammed the door. She probably locked it, too. She usually did, and I never knew if it was just to keep Dad out, or if she was keeping me out, too. She sure as hell wasn’t letting me in.
13.
I catch my first glimpse of the Wall, black against the green, and suddenly become aware that there is somebody standing beside the path. I turn my head, my heartbeat accelerating. But the man beside the path isn’t going to hurt me. He’s wearing camouflage pants; his dogtags gleam against his naked chest. Half of his head is gone in a red and gray ooze that stains his neck and shoulder. His remaining eye looks at me. It is brown, so I know that he is not you; your eyes were blue.
14.
I think of you when I look at my patients. I wonder if it would be better if you were one of them, if you were alive and I could touch you. I look at their wives when they come to visit, at the hope in their eyes that turns to pain every single time, and I think, no, it’s better that you’re dead, that I can’t even pretend that I will ever see you smile again. But when I wake up at five in the morning and know, because my eyes and pillow are wet, that I’ve been dreaming of you, I know that anything would be better than this emptiness, and I would give anything to be able to touch your hand again, even if you didn’t know I was touching it.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Page 2