Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Can you see me now, Dorry? she whispered, her voice burrowing in behind my eyes, filled with pain and joy and regret beyond all comprehension. Have you seen enough? Or do you need to see more?

  “No,” I told her, waking up, opening my eyes wide and vomiting onto the floor beneath my bunk. The Laskar coils had stopped wheezing, and the crawler was no longer moving. I rolled over and lay very still, cold and sick and sweating, staring up at the dingy, low ceiling until the prospector finally came looking for me.

  When I left home back in Aries, I brought the monk’s book with me, the book from Sailor’s crate of discards. I sit here on my bedroll in one corner of one room inside the concrete and steel husk of a bombed-out federal compound in Lowell. I have come this far, and I am comforted by the knowledge that there’s only a little ways left to go. I open the book and read the words aloud again, the words underlined in red ink, that I might understand how not to lose my way in this tale which is almost all that remains of me: “No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their truer nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a construct of the mind of man.”

  I think this means I can stop when I’m ready.

  I’ve been in Lowell for almost a full week now, writing all this shit down. Today is Monday, Libra 17th. We are deep in winter, and I have never been this far south.

  There is a silence here, in this dead city, that seems almost as solid as the bare concrete around me. I’m camped far enough in from the transfer station that the hanger noise, the comings and goings of the zeps and spinners, the clockwork opening and closing of the dome, seem little more than a distant, occasional thunder. I’m not sure I’ve ever known such a profound silence as this. Were I sane, it might drive me mad. There are sounds, sounds other than the far-off noise of the station, but they are petty things that only seem to underscore the silence. They’re more like the too-often recollected memory of sound, an ancient woman deaf since childhood remembering what sound was like before she lost it forever.

  Last night, I lay awake, fighting sleep, listening to my heart and all those other petty sounds. I dozed towards dawn, and when I woke there was a woman crouched a few feet from my bedroll. She was reading the monk’s book, flipping the pages in the dark, and, at first, I thought I was dreaming again, that this was another dream of Sailor. But then she closed the book and looked at me. Even in the dark, I could tell she wasn’t as young as Sailor, and I saw that her head was shaved down to the skin. Her eyes were iridescent and flashed blue-green in the gloom.

  “May I switch on the light?” I asked, pointing towards the travel lamp near my pillow.

  “If you wish,” she replied and set the book back down among my things. “If you need it.”

  I touched the lamp, and it blinked obediently on, throwing long shadows against the walls and floor and ceiling of the room where I was sleeping. The woman squinted, cursed, and turned her face away. I rubbed at my own eyes and sat up.

  “What do you want?” I asked her.

  “We saw you, yesterday. You were watching.”

  The woman was a Fenrir priest. She wore the signs on her skin and ragged clothing. Her feet were bare, and there was a simple onyx ring on each of her toes. I could tell that she’d been very beautiful once.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I was watching.”

  “But you didn’t come for the mark,” she said, not asking because she already knew the answer. “You came to find someone.”

  “Does that happen very often?”

  She turned her face towards me again, shading her eyes with her left hand. “Do you think you will find her, Dorry? Do you think you’ll take her back?”

  It hadn’t been hard to locate the temple. The old federal complex lies near the center of the dome, what the bombs left of it, anyway, and finding it was really no more than a matter of walking. The day that I arrived in Lowell City, one of the Transfer Authority’s security agents had detained and questioned me for an hour or so, and I’d assured her that I was there as a scholar, looking for records that might have survived the war. I’d shown her the paper map that I’d purchased at a bookshop in Bosporos and pointed out the black X I’d made about half a mile north of the feddy, near one of the old canals. She’d looked at the map two or three times, asked me a few questions about the journey down from Holden, and then made a call to her senior officer before releasing me.

  “You don’t want to go down that way,” she’d told me, tapping the map with an index finger. “I can’t hold you here or deport you, Councilor. But you better trust me on this. You don’t want to go down there.”

  “You’ve been chasing her such a long time,” the woman crouched on the floor before me said, speaking more quietly now and smiling. Her teeth were filed to sharp points, and she licked at them with the tip of her violet tongue. “You must have had a lot of chances to give up. There must have been so much despair.”

  “Is she dead?” I asked, the words slipping almost nonsensically from my lips.

  “No one dies. You know that. You’ve known that since the camp. No one ever dies.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “She’s with the Wolf,” the woman whispered. “Three weeks now, she’s with the Wolf. You came too late, Dorry. You came to her too late,” and she drew a knife from her belt, something crude and heavy fashioned from scrap metal. “She isn’t waiting anymore.”

  I kicked her hard, the toe of my right boot catching her in the chest just below her collar bone, and the priest cried out and fell over backwards. The knife slipped from her fingers and skittered away across the concrete.

  “Did the Wolf tell you that you’d never die?” I demanded, getting to my feet and aiming the pistol at her head. I’d bought that in Bosporos, as well, the same day I’d bought the map, black-market military picked up cheap in the backroom of a britch bar. The blinking green ready light behind the sight assured me that the safety was off, that the trip cells were hot, and there was a live charge in the chamber. The woman coughed and clutched at her chest, then spat something dark onto the floor.

  “That’s what I want to know, bitch,” I said, “what I want you to tell me,” and I kicked her in the ribs. She grunted and tried to crawl away, so I kicked her again, harder than before, and she stopped moving. “I want you to tell me if that’s what it promised you, that you’d fucking get to live forever if you brought it whatever it needed. Because I want you to know that it fucking lied.”

  And she opened her mouth wide, then, and I caught a glimpse of the barbed thing uncoiling from the hollow beneath her tongue, and I squeezed the trigger.

  I suspect that one gunshot was the loudest noise anyone’s heard here since the day bombs fell on Lowell. It echoed off the thick walls, all that noise trapped in such a little room, and left my ears ringing painfully. The priest was dead, and I sat down on my bedroll again. I’d never imagined that there would be so much blood or that killing someone could be so very simple. No, that’s not true. That’s a goddamn lie. I’ve imagined it all along.

  I’ve been sitting here on the roof for the last hour, watching as the domeworks begin to mimic the morning light, shivering while the frost clinging to the old masonry melts away as the solar panels warm the air of Lowell. I brought the monk’s book with me and half a bottle of whiskey and the gun. And my notebook, to write the last of it down.

  When the bottle is empty, maybe then I’ll make a decision. Maybe then I’ll know what comes next.

  BRADBURY WEATHER

  My love affair with Mars goes back to my childhood, to the seventies, to the Viking landers, to my discovery of Barsoom and The Martian Chronicles, and to Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Knowing full well I’ll never walk those rusty red plains, I hope my ashes might someday be scattered throughout the channels of the Kasei Valles or across the dry-ice glaciers of the north polar cap. We earthbound creatures can always dream.
Along with The Dry Salvages (2003), “Bradbury Weather” marks the beginning of my trusting myself with first-person narratives.

  Pony

  1. The Window (April)

  Helen opens a window, props it open with a brick, and in a moment I can smell the Chinese wisteria out in the garden. The first genuinely warm breezes of spring spilling across the sill, filled with the smells of drooping white blossoms and a hundred other growing things. The sun is so warm on my face, and I lie on the floor and watch the only cloud I can see floating alone in a sky so blue it might still be winter out there. She was reading her poetry to me. I’ve been drinking cheap red wine from a chipped coffee cup with an Edward Gorey drawing printed on one side, and she’s been reading me her poetry and pausing to talk about the field. At that moment, I still think that neither of us has been back to the field in years, and it’s surprisingly easy to fool myself into believing that my memories are only some silly ghost story Helen’s been slipping in between the stanzas. Not the vulgar sort of spook story that people write these days. More like something an Arthur Machen or an Algernon Blackwood might have written, something more mood and suggestion than anything else, and I congratulate myself on feeling so removed from that night in the field and take another sip of the bitter wine. Helen’s been drinking water, only bottled water from a ruby-stemmed wine glass, because she says wine makes her slur.

  I open my bathrobe, and the sun feels clean and good across my breasts and belly. I’m very proud of my belly, that it’s still flat and hard this far past thirty. Helen stops reading her poem again and squeezes my left nipple until I tell her to quit it. She pretends to pout until I tell her to stop that, too.

  “I went back,” she says, and I keep my eyes on that one cloud, way up there where words and bad memories can’t ever reach it. Helen’s quiet for almost a full minute, and then she says, “Nothing happened. I just walked around for a little while, that’s all. I just wanted to see.”

  “That last line seemed a bit forced,” I say. “Maybe you should read it to me again,” and I shut my eyes, but I don’t have to see her face to know the sudden change in her expression or to feel the chill hiding just underneath the warm breeze getting in through the window. It must have been there all along, the chill, but I was too busy with the sun and my one cloud and the smell of Chinese wisteria to notice. I watch a scatter of orange afterimages floating in the darkness behind my eyelids and wait for Helen to bite back.

  “I need a cigarette,” she says, and I start to apologize, but it would be a lie, and I figure I’ve probably done enough damage for one afternoon. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood as she crosses the room to the little table near her side of the bed. The table with her typewriter. I hear her strike a match and smell the sulfur.

  “Nothing happened,” she says again. “You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”

  “If nothing happened,” I reply, “then there’s no need for this conversation, is there?” And I open my eyes again. My cloud has moved along an inch or so towards the right side of the window frame, which would be east, and I can hear a mockingbird singing.

  “Someone fixed the lock on the gate,” she says. “I had to climb over. They put up a sign, too. Posted. No trespassing.”

  “But you climbed over anyway?”

  “No one saw me.”

  “I don’t care. It was still illegal.”

  “I went all the way up the hill,” she tells me. “I went all the way to the stone wall.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about this,” I say and roll over on my left side, rolling towards her, rolling away from the window and the cloud, the wisteria smell and the chattering mockingbird, and my elbow hits the Edward Gorey cup and it tips over. The wine almost looks like blood as it flows across the floor and the handwritten pages Helen’s left lying there. The burgundy undoes her words, her delicate fountain-pen cursive, and the ink runs and mixes with the wine.

  “Fuck you,” she says and leaves me alone in the room, only a ragged, fading smoke ghost to mark the space she occupied a few seconds before. I pick up the empty cup, cursing myself, my carelessness and the things I’ve said because I’m scared and too drunk not to show it, and somewhere in the house a door slams. Later on, I think, Helen will believe it was only an accident, and I’m not so drunk or scared or stupid to know I’m better off not going after her. Outside, the mockingbird’s stopped singing, and when I look back at the window, I can’t find the white cloud anywhere.

  2. The Field (October)

  This is not the night. This is only a dream of the night, only my incomplete, unreliable memories of a dream, which is as close as I can come on paper. The dream I’ve had more times now than I can recall, and it’s never precisely the truth of things, and it’s never the same twice. I have even tried putting it down on canvas, again and again, but I can hardly stand the sight of them, those damned absurd paintings. I used to keep them hidden behind the old chifforobe where I store my paints and brushes and jars of pigment, kept them there until Helen finally found them. Sometimes, I still think about burning them.

  The gate with the broken padlock, the gate halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck, and I follow you down the dirt road that winds steeply up the hill through the old apple orchard, past trees planted and grown before our parents were born, trees planted when our grandparents were still young. And the moon’s so full and bright I can see everything – the ground-fall fruit rotting in the grass, your eyes, a fat spider hanging in her web. I can see the place ahead of us where the road turns sharply away from the orchard towards a field no one’s bothered to plow in half a century or more, and you stop and hold a hand cupped to your right ear.

  “No,” I reply, when you tell me that you can hear music and ask if I can hear it, too. I’m not lying. I can’t hear much of anything but the wind in the limbs of the apple trees and a dog barking somewhere far away.

  “Well, I can. I can hear it clear as anything,” you say, and then you leave the dirt road and head off through the trees.

  Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard. The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.

  A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember anymore, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field. You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing. The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.

  “Tell me that you can see her,” you say, and I start to tell you that I don’t see anything at all, that I don’t know what you’re talking about and we really ought to go back to the car. Sometimes, I try to remember why I let you talk me into pulling off the road and parking in the weeds and wandering off into the trees.

  We cannot comprehend even the edges of the abyss.

  So we don’t try.

  We walk together on warm silver nights,

  And there is cider in the air and

  Someone has turned the ponies out again.

  It’s easier to steal your thoughts than make my own.

  “Please, tell me you can see her.”

  And I can, but I don’t tell you that. I have never yet told you that. Not in so many words. But I can see her standing there in th
e wide field, the tall, tall girl and the moon washing white across her wide shoulders and full breasts and Palomino hips, and then she sees us and turns quickly away. There are no clouds, and the moon’s so bright that there’s no mistaking the way her black hair continues straight down the center of her back like a horse’s mane or the long tail that swats nervously from one side of her ass to the other as she begins to run. Sometimes I take your arm and hold you tight and stop you from going over the stone wall after her. Sometimes you stand very still and only watch. Sometimes you call out for her to please come back to you, that there’s nothing to be afraid of because we’d never hurt her. Sometimes there are tears in your eyes, and you call me names and beg me to please, please let you run with her.

  The cold iron flash from her hooves,

  And that’s my heart lost in the night.

  I know all the lies. I know all the lies.

  I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks

  No one is watching.

  And we stand there a very long time, until there’s nothing more to see or say that we haven’t seen. You’re the first to head back down the hill towards the car, and sometimes we get lost and seem to wander for hours and hours through the orchard, through tangles of creeper vines and wild grapes that weren’t there before. And other times, it seems to take no time at all.

  3. The Pantomime (January – February)

  This is almost five months later, five months after that night at the edge of the field halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck. We never really talked about it. Helen would bring it up, and I would always, always immediately change the subject. I didn’t tell her about the dreams I’d started having, living it over and over again in my sleep. And then one night we were fucking – not having sex, not making love – fucking, hammering our bodies one against the other, fucking so hard we’d both be bruised and sore the next day, as if this were actually some argument we lacked the courage to ever have aloud, so fucking instead of screaming at one another. And she began to whisper, details of what we’d seen or only thought we’d seen, what we’d seen re-imagined and embellished and become some sick fantasy of Helen’s. I pushed her away from me, disgusted, angry, and so I pushed too hard, harder than I’d meant to push her. She slipped off the side of the bed and struck her chin against the floor. She bit her tongue, and there was blood on her lips and her chin, and then she was screaming at me, telling me I was a coward, telling me I was a bitch and a coward and a liar, and I lay still and stared at the ceiling and didn’t say a single word in my defense. Most of what she said was true or very nearly true, but hearing it like that couldn’t change anything. A few minutes later she was crying and went off to the bathroom to wipe the blood off her face, and I took my pillow and a blanket from the closet and spent the night downstairs on the sofa.