by John Klima
“The poet turned to her and said,
‘A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.’
“‘That’s enough for now,’ said Lilit. ‘You see, Kamora, your poet works. Now take him to your Empress, and marry your Cloud Dragon. But don’t visit me again, because the next time you come I won’t be here.’”
“And was he the greatest poet that ever lived?” asked Samuel. We were sitting on the riverbank, where the Alph begins to disappear into the fissures below, surrounded by the scent of roses. The sun was setting, and the walls of the palace had changed from white to gold, and then to indigo. I could not see his face, but his voice sounded sad.
“He was, in the palace of the Empress Nasren,” I said. “He wrote a different poem for her every night, and she gathered scribes around her to make copies so they could be taken to every village. They were set to music, as poems were in those days, and sung at every village fair. And when her ambassadors traveled to other countries, they carried the volumes of his poems, fourteen of them, the number of the constellations, on the back of a white elephant, so they could be presented to foreign sultans and caliphs and tzars.”
“But elsewhere, in the country of daffodils and mutton and rain? Because I think, Sabra, that you come from outside this dream, as I do.”
“In that country, he was a poet who could not finish his poems, and who, for many years, did not write poems at all. How could he, when every night in the palace of the Empress, he wrote a new poem entirely for her? What was left over, after that?”
“Perhaps. Yes, perhaps that is true.”
We heard it then: lightning, crashing over the palace, turning the walls again from indigo to white. Once, twice, three times.
“He has come,” said Samuel. “He has come, the person from Porlock.” And then suddenly, he was gone.
I was staring at my computer screen, on which I had written, “The Kubla Khan of Coleridge’s poem is not the historical Kubla Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, and Xanadu is not Shangdu.”
Again, I heard three knocks on the apartment door. “Sabra, are you there? It’s Michael.”
I rose, and went to open the door. “You people!” I said, as Michael walked in, carrying two bags of groceries.
“What do you mean?” he asked, startled.
“You people from Porlock, always interrupting.”
He kissed me and put the bags he had been carrying on the table. “I was thinking of making a curry, but—you’ve had better curry than I can make. Are you going to laugh at my curry?”
“I would never laugh at your curry.”
He began unpacking the grocery bags. “So, what were you thinking about so hard that you didn’t hear me knock?”
“Coleridge. About how he never finished anything. And about how I’m not sure I want to finish this PhD. Michael, what would you think if I became a writer?”
“Fine by me, as long as you become famous—and rich, so you can keep me in a style to which I am not accustomed.”
Later, after dinner, which was not as disastrous as I had expected, I called my mother. “Nasren Makeda, please.”
“Just a moment. Madame Makeda, it’s your daughter.”
“Sabra! How good it is to hear your voice. I’m in Vienna with Ronnie. Darling, I’m so bored. Won’t you come visit your poor mother? You can’t imagine these rock and roll people. They have no culture whatsoever. One can’t talk to them about anything.”
“Mom, I’d like you to come to Boston and meet Michael.”
“The one from Ohio? Oh, Sabra. Well, I suppose we can’t control whom we fall in love with. It was like that with your father. He was the only man I ever loved, and yet he was shorter than I am by three inches, and that nose—such a pity you inherited it, although you have my ears, thank goodness. But I tell you the truth, I would have married him even if he had not been rich. He was that sort of man. So, I will come and meet your Michael. I can fly over in Ronnie’s plane. Is there a month when Boston is warm? I can come then.”
Perhaps he would fall in love with her. But sometimes one has to take chances.
For Kamora’s marriage to the Cloud Dragon, the Empress’s poet Samuel wrote a new poem, one that no one had heard before. It began,
Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,
The linnet and thrush say, “I love and I love.”
Alem Das himself sang it, playing a dulcimer strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. When he was finished, the Empress Nasren clapped, and Kamora, in the Empress’s wedding veil, turned to her husband and blushed.
Later that night, in the cave of the Cloud Dragon, he said to her, “It may be that you are too clever to be my wife.”
She stroked his silver hair and looked with wonder at his pale shoulders, shy for once before his human form. “And perhaps you are too beautiful to be my husband.”
“Then we are well-matched,” he said, “for together there is none in the world more clever or more beautiful than we. And now, my clever wife, are you going to kiss your husband?”
That night, the top of Mount Abora was wreathed in clouds. The Empress Nasren saw it as she walked in the garden of her palace, and she told blind Alem Das, who was walking with her. “Did you know, my friend, that it would end like this?” she asked.
Alem Das laughed in the darkness. “I suspected, from the moment Kamora insisted that my dulcimer should be strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon. She always was a clever girl, although not as clever, I like to think, as her uncle.”
“So, your niece is happy,” said the Empress. “It is good that she is happy, although we who are old, Alem, know that happiness is fleeting.” And she sighed her soft, mad sigh.
“Yes, lady,” said Alem Das. “But tonight your roses are blooming, and I can hear the splashing of fountains. Somewhere inside the palace, your poet is reciting to the wedding guests, who are drunk on honey wine. And we who are old can remember what it was like to be young and foolish and happy, and be content.” And they walked on in the moonlight, the instrument-maker and the Empress.
* * *
A•P•P•O•G•G•I•A•T•U•R•A
ap·pog·gia·tu·ra e-'pä-je-'tur-e
noun
: an embellishing note or tone preceding an essential melodic note or tone and usually written as a note of smaller size
* * *
Appoggiatura
JEFF VANDERMEER
Autochthonous
AT THE UNIVERSITY TODAY, I cracked an egg yolk into my coworker Farid’s coffee while he was off photocopying something. The yolk looked like the sun disappearing into a deep well. The smell made me think of the chickens on my parents’ farm and then it wasn’t long before I was thinking about my father and his temper. It made me almost regret doing it. But when Farid came back he didn’t even notice the taste. He was too busy researching the architecture of some American city for one of the professors. My yolk and his research were a good fit as far as I was concerned, especially since that was supposed to be my project. But he was always pushing and he was an artist, whereas I was just getting a history and religion degree. I wouldn’t have anything to show for that until much later.
After he left and the building was empty, I set a fire in the wastebasket on the fourth floor, being careful to use a bit of string as a fuse so it wouldn’t start to blaze until after I’d gotten on the bus down the street.
On the way home to my apartment, through the usual roadblocks and searches, I embedded a personal command into the minds of the other people on the bus using the image of the saintly Hermes Trismegistus. He said to them, “Tomorrow, you will do something extraordinary for the Green.”
When I got to the complex, I stopped at each la
nding and used a piece of chalk to draw a random symbol. If there was a newspaper in front of someone’s door, I would write on it or rip it or whatever came to mind.
I walked into my box of an apartment, grey walls grey rooms, and took off my clothes. I painted myself green and leapt at the walls until the green mixed with the red of my blood and the grey was gone. Then I turned on the family TV that my mother had made me take when I came to the city and at the same moment I drove a paperweight through the screen. My fingers and arm vibrated from the shock.
But nothing else happened. There was no revelation. No sign.
I crumpled to the floor and began to cry.
When will the Green move through me? What will it take?
Cambist
AT THE ANADOLUBANK in Istanbul, Hazine Tarosian has handled them all. Crinkled and smooth, crisp and softly old. To her, new bills smell like ink and presses moving at high speed. There’s a hint of friction in the paper, of burning smoke, that gives motion to the images, living contrast to inert cold coins. A burst of sunflower, bee in orbit around pollen, for the Netherlands. Ireland’s beefy headshot of James Joyce, with Ulysses on the other side. The sibilance of Egypt’s Arabic letters against a backdrop of Caliph-era battlements, in the distance a verdigris dome, last link to fabled Smaragdine. The careful detail of Thai King Bhumanibol calm upon his throne, sword across his lap, a flaming mandala at his back. Or even Portugal’s massed galleons listing, sails taut against the whorled wind, sun a complex compass.
Hazine has begun to believe that the value of such wonders should be based on something more lasting than the rate of exchange. The verdigris dome in particular has so enthralled her that she even bought a book about Smaragdine called The Myths of the Green Tablet and a few old coins that she keeps in a display at her bank office.
For months now the image of the dome has come to her at night. She is floating over it and it is floating up toward her, until she’s falling down through the dome and she can see, distant but ever closer: a green tablet, a ruined tower, an entire ancient city.
This dream is so vivid that Hazine always wakes gasping, the solution to some great mystery already receding into the darkness. Friends tell her the dream is about her job, and yet it informs her waking life in unexpected ways, imbues certain people and things with vibrant light and color. She keeps the Egyptian bill in her wallet. The suggestion, the hint, of Smaragdine, is so potent, as if a place must be hidden to become real.
Is this, then, the power of money? Hazine thinks, bringing tea and the newspaper back to bed with her in the mornings, her lover asleep and dreamless beside her.
Chiaroscuro
I WAS STILL SEARCHING for the missing daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Cyprus when the locals brought me in on another case. They’d heard I was staying at the Hilton—an American and a detective, in a city where neither passed through with any regularity. The police deputy, a weathered old man with a scar through his left eyesocket, made it clear that it would be best if I got into his beat-up Ford Fiesta with the lonely siren on top, and ventured out into the sun-beaten city to help him.
It was a crap ride, through a welter of tan buildings with no hint anymore of the green that had made the place famous since antiquity. The river had become a stream. The lake that it fed into was entombed in salt. The cotton they turned to as a crop just made it all worse. They’d survived a dictator, too, who had starved and disappeared people while building a monstrous palace. Becoming modern is a bitch for some people.
The dead guy, a painter the deputy told me, turned out to have lived on the seventh floor of what looked like a Soviet-era housing project made from those metal shelves you see at hardware stores. The smell of piss and cigarettes in the stairwell almost made me want to take up cigs again and find a bar. Most of the complex was deserted.
The painter’s place had an unwashed, turpentine-and-glue smell. Several large canvases had been leaned against the wall, under cloth. Through a huge window the light entered with a ferocious velocity. Somewhere out in that glare lay the ruins of the old city center.
In the middle of the floor, a young man lay in the usual pool of blood. I could see a large, tissue-filled hole in his back. Behind him, one canvas remained uncovered on an easel.
Against a soft dark-green background so intense it hit me like the taste of mouthwash, a girl sat on a stone bench in an explosion of light. Pale skin. A simple black dress. No shoes. No nail polish. A sash around her waist that almost hid a pack of cigs shoved in at the left side. Her head was tilted, chin out, as if looking up at someone. A thin smile that could have been caution or control. She held something even greener than the background, but someone—the murderer I guessed—had scratched it out with a knife. It could have been a book; at least, she held it like a book, although there was something too fleshy about the hints of it still left on the canvas.
For a moment, I thought I’d found the missing girl. For a moment, I thought I’d found something even more important.
I looked around the apartment a bit, but my gaze kept coming back to the painting. It was signed in the corner with the initials “F.S.”
I kept thinking, Why did they defile the painting?
After awhile, the police deputy asked me in his imperfect English, “You know what happen? Who?”
Somewhere in this rat’s warren of apartments there was probably a man whose wife or daughter the artist had been screwing. Or someone he owed a lot of money to. Or just a psychopath. You get used to the options after awhile. They aren’t complicated.
I breathed in the smoky air. They weren’t ever going to find the guy who had done this. Not in this country. It was still reinventing itself. Deaths like these were part of the price you paid. The police deputy probably didn’t expect it to be solved. He probably didn’t really care, so long as he could say he’d tried.
“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “But how much to let me take that painting?”
Dulcimer
From the Book of Smaragdine, 212th Edition:
The dulcimer has many esoteric uses in the spiritual and medical worlds. Playing the dulcimer while attaching a wresting thread to a person with a sprain will hasten the winding of the thread and the healing of the sprain. A man who plays the dulcimer over the grave of his dead wife will ensure that she stays dead and does not pay unexpected visits. A woman who plays the dulcimer holding it backwards will reverse her bad luck and bring home a wayward lover. A child who stands on one leg and attempts the dulcimer with chin and left hand while the right arm is tied behind the back will inevitably fall. If making a doppelganger using the priests’ emerald powder, the dulcimer should be played during the mixing; otherwise, your monster may coalesce with a vestigial tale or tail. It is also known that playing the dulcimer after dinner increases the chance of pleasant conversation, if accompanied by wine and a nice dessert.
Eczema
ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN Eczema’s act for the Babilim Traveling Circus knows it is only enhanced by the equal and opposite reaction created by Psoriasis. Touring erratically throughout Central Asia and the Far East (where not banned by law), the circus has only rarely been captured on film or in still photographs.
Although myths about Eczema’s act abound, most eyewitnesses agree on the basics: Eczema, so nicknamed by her late father, a doctor, for the predominant condition of her formative years, enters the ring accompanied by helpers who carry several small boxes under their arms. Eczema is heavily made up in whiteface and wears a man’s costume more fitting for a sultan, including curved shoes. A fake mustache completes the illusion. In the background a local band plays something approximating circus music.
Eczema’s assistants, dressed all in black, fan out around her. Some of them place shiny green models of buildings upon the floor while others arrange a variety of insects in amongst the buildings, including scarab beetles, praying mantises, and grass-hoppers. Some are green or have been painted green, while others are red or have been painted red
. A few flies, large moths, and butterflies weakly buzz or flutter above on long, glittering strands of hair plucked from the heads of Tibetan holy men, the leads held by specially trained insect handlers.
Eczema stands in the background as an announcer or ringmaster comes forward and says, “The King of Smaragdine now recreates for you, using his minions, the Great Battle between the Smaragdineans of the Green Tablet and the Turks.”
Reports differ on the battle’s historical accuracy. Certainly, the Turks ruled the area around Smaragdine for some three hundred years, but records from the time are often incomplete.
As for the act itself, some describe it as “insects wandering around a badly made scale model of an ancient city, after which the crowd rioted to show their displeasure.” Others describe “the incredible sight of beetles, ants, and other insects recreating miniature set pieces of ancient battles amongst the spires and fortifications of a realistic and highly detailed cityscape. One of the most marvelous things ever seen.”
During this spectacle, Eczema stands to the side, gesturing like an orchestra conductor and blowing on a whistle that makes no sound.
Most accounts agree that the act comes to an abrupt end when the insects that have not escaped are swept up by the helpers. A few eyewitnesses, however, tell tales of an ending in which “huge bass-like mudskippers hop on their fins through the cityscape, gobbling up the insects.”
Eczema then comes forward and says, in a grave tone, “What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below for performing the miracle of one thing. And as all things were produced from one by the Meditation of one, so all things are produced from this one thing by adaptation.”