Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  August 22, 2027 (2:56 a.m.)

  Always have I been a sober drunk. I’ve finished the gin & started on an old bottle of rye whisky – gift from some former lover I won’t name here – bcause I didn’t feel like walking through the muggy, dusty evening, risking life and limb & lung for another pretty blue bottle of Bombay. A sober & lazy drunk, adverse to taking unnecessary risks. Sabit has not yet reappeared, likely she will not. I suspect she believes she has won not only the battle, but the war, as well. Good for her. May she go haunt some other sad fuck’s life. Of course, the apt. is still awash in her junk, her clothes, her stitch lit, the hc zines and discs & her txtbooks filled with diagrams, schematics of skeletons & musculature, neuroanatomy, surgical technique, organic chem and pharmacology, immunology, all that crap. Snip porn. I should dump it all. I should call someone 2830 to cart it all away so I don’t have to fucking look at it anymore. The clothes, her lucite ashtrays, the smoky, musky, spicy smell of her, bottles of perfume, cosmetics, music, Sanrio vibrators, jewelry, deodorant, jasmine soap, baby teeth & jesus all the CRAP she’s left behind to keep me company. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be awake anymore ever again. Why did she want to rub my nose in #17? Just that she’s finally found a flaw, a goddamn weakness, & she has to make the most of it? A talkative, sober drunk. But wait – there is something. There is something else I found in Welleran Smith, & I’m gonna write it down. Something more from the diary/ies of Dr. Judith Darger, unless it’s only something Smith concocted to suit his own ends. More & more I consider that likelihood, that Darger is only some lunatic just happened to be where these people needed her to be, but isn’t that how it always is with saints and martyrs? Questions of victimhood arise. Who’s exploiting who? Who’s exploiting whom? Christ I get lost in all these words. I don’t need words. I’m strangling on words. I need to see Sabit & end this mess & be done with her. According to Welleran Smith, Darger writes (none of the “entries” are dated): “I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I wouldn’t lie. It is going to hurt, and it is going to hurt forever or as long as human consciousness may endure. It is going to hurt until it doesn’t hurt anymore. That is what I would tell a child. That is what I tell myself, and what am I but my own child? So, I will not lie to any of you. Yes, there will be pain, and at times the pain will seem unbearable. But the pain will open doorways. The pain is a doorway, as is the scalpel and as are the sutures and each and every incision. Pain is to be thrown open wide that all may gaze at the wonders which lie beyond. Why is it assumed this flesh must not be cut? Why is it assumed this is my final corporeal form? What is it we cannot yet see for all our fear of pain and ugliness and disfiguration? I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I would teach a child to live in pain.” Is that what I am learning from you, Sabit? Is that the lesson of #17 and the glassy stare of those six eyes? Would you, all of you, teach me to live with pain?

  August 23, 2027

  It’s almost dawn, that first false dawn & just a bit of hesitant purple where the sky isn’t quite night anymore. As much as I have ever seen false dawn in the city, where we try so hard to keep the night away forever. If I had a son, or a daughter, I would tell them a story, how people are @ war with night, & the city – like all cities – is only a fortress built to hold back the night, even though all the world is just a bit of grit floating in a sea of night that might go on almost forever. I’m on the roof. I’ve never been up here before. Sabit & I never came up here. Maybe another three hours left before it’s too hot & bright to sit up here, only 95F now if my watch is telling me the truth. My face & hair are slick with sweat, sweating out the booze & pills, sweating out the sweet & sour memory of Sabit. It feels good to sweat. I went to Pearl St. & the Trenton reveal @ Corpus ex Machina, but apparently she did not. Maybe she had something better to do & someone better to be doing it with. I flashed my press tag @ the door, so at least I didn’t have to pay the $47 cover. I was not the only pundit in attendance. I saw Kline, who’s over @ the Voice these days (that venerable old whore) & I saw Garrison, too. Buzzards w/their beaks sharp, stomachs empty, mouths watering. No, I do not know if birds salivate, but reporters sure fucking do. None of them spoke to me, & I exchanged the favor. The place was replete, as the dollymops are wont to say, chock-full, standing room only. I sipped dirty martinis and licorice shides & looked no one in the eye, no one who was not on exhibit. #17 was near the back, not as well lit as some of the others, & I stood there & stared, bcause that is what I’d come for. Sometimes it gazed back @ me, or they gazed @ me – I am uncertain of the proper idiom or parlance or phrase. Is it One or are they 3? I stared & stared & stared, like any good voyeur would do, any dedicated peeper, bcause no clips are allowed, so you stand & drink it all in there the same way the Neanderthals did it or pony up the fat spool of cash for one of the Trenton chips or mnemonic lozenges (“all proceeds for R&D, promo, & ongoing medical expenses,” of course). I looked until all I saw was all I was meant to see – the sculpted body(ies), living & breathing & conscious – the perpetually hurting realization of all Darger’s nightmares. If I saw beauty there, it was no different from the beauty I saw in Brooklyn after the New Konsojaya Trading Co. popped their micro-nuke over on Tillary St. No different from the hundred lingering deaths I’ve witnessed. Welleran Smith said this was to be “the soul’s terrorism against the tyranny of genes & phenotype.” I stood there & I saw everything there was to see. Maybe Sabit would have been proud. Maybe she would have been disappointed @ my resolve. It hardly matters, either way. A drop of sweat dissolving on my tongue & I wonder if that’s the way the ocean used to taste, when it wasn’t suicide to taste the ocean? When I had seen all I had come to see, my communion w/#17, I found an empty stool @ the bar. I thought you might still put in an appearance, Sabit, so I got drunker & waited for a glimpse of you in the crowd. & there was a man sitting next to me, Harvey somebody or another from Chicago, gray-haired with a mustache, & he talked & I listened, as best I could hear him over the music. I think the music was suffocating me. He said, That’s my granddaughter over there, what’s left of her, & he pointed thru the crush of bodies toward a stitchwork hanging from the warehouse ceiling, a dim chandelier of circuitry & bone & muscles flayed & rearranged. I’d looked at the piece on the way in – The Lighthouse of Francis Bacon, it was called. The old man told me he’d been following the show for months, but now he was almost broke & would have to head back to Chicago soon. He was only drinking ginger ale. I bought him a ginger ale & listened, leaning close so he didn’t have to shout to be heard. The chandelier had once been a student @ the Pritzker School of Medicine, but then, he said, “something happened.” I did not ask what. I decided if he wanted me to know, he would tell me. He didn’t. Didn’t tell me, I mean. He tried to buy me a drink, but I wouldn’t let him. The grandfather of the Lighthouse of Francis Bacon tried to buy me a drink, & I realized I was thinking like a journalist again, thinking you dumb fucks – here’s your goddamn story – not some bullshit hearsay about chicanery among the snips, no, this old man’s your goddamn story, this poor guy probably born way the fuck back before man even walked on the goddamn moon & now he’s sitting here at the end of the world, this anonymous old man rubbing his bony shoulders with the tourists and art critics & stitch fiends and freaks because his granddaughter decided she’d rather be a fucking light fixture than a gynecologist. Oh god, Sabit. If you could have shown him your brand-new tattoo. I left the place before midnight, paid the hack extra to go farther south, to get me as near the ruins as he dared. I needed to see them, that’s all. Rings of flesh & towers of iron, right, rust-stained granite and the empty eye sockets where once were windows. The skyscraper stubs of Old Downtown, Wall St. and Battery Park City, all hurricane aftermaths of it inundated by the rising waters there @ the confluence of the Hudson & the E. River. And then I came home, & now I am sitting here on the roof, getting less & less drunk, sweating & listening to traffic & the city waking up aroun
d me – the living fossil with her antique keyboard. If you do come back here, Sabit, if that’s whatever happens next, you will not find me intimidated by your XVII or by #17, either, but I don’t think you ever will. You’ve moved on. & if you send someone to pack up your shit, I’ll probably already be in Bratislava by then. After CeM, there were 2 good assigns waiting for me in the green bin, & I’m taking the one that gets me far, far, farthest away from here for 3 weeks in Slovakia. But right now I’m just gonna sit here on the roof & watch the sun come up all swollen & lobster red over this rotten, drowning city, over this rotten fucking world. I think the pigeons are waking up.

  A SEASON OF BROKEN DOLLS

  During the winter of 2007, I was plagued by a terrible recurring dream. It came almost every night, and I’d spend the days in between the dream’s recurrence in a foggy state I have called dreamsickness. The dream, recorded in my LiveJournal (December 18, 2006 – March 11, 2007) and in the chapbook B is for Beginnings (Subterranean Press, 2009), left me with two short stories. I needed the dream visitation of what felt like a thoroughly authentic parallel life to end, and I meant to kill it with a short story. Two were required. “A Season of Broken Dolls” is the first, and is far less literal than the second, “In View of Nothing.” At the time I chided myself for abstracting the dream so entirely in “A Season of Broken Dolls,” but now I consider it one of my best pieces of science fiction.

  In View of Nothing

  Oh, pity us here, we angels of lead.

  We’re dead, we’re sick, hanging by thread…

  David Bowie (“Get Real,” 1995)

  02. The Bed

  My breasts ache.

  I have enough trouble just remembering the name of this city, and I have yet to be convinced that the name remains the same from one day to the next, one night to the next night. Or even that the city itself remains the same. These are the very sorts of details that will be my undoing someday, someday quite soon, if I am anything less than mindful. Today, I believe that I have awakened in Sakyo-ku, in the Kyoto Prefecture, but lying here staring up at the bright banks of fluorescent lights on the ceiling, I might be anywhere. I might well be in Boston or Johannesburg or Sydney, and maybe I’ve never even been to Japan. Maybe I have lived my entire life without setting foot in Kyoto.

  From where I lie, almost everything seems merely various shades of unwelcome conjecture. Almost everything. I think about getting up and going to the window, because from there I might confirm or deny my Kyoto hypothesis. I might spy the Kamo River, flowing down from its source on Mount Sajikigatake, or the withered cherry trees that did not blossom last year and perhaps will not blossom this spring, either. I might see the silver-grey ribbon of the Kamo, running between the neon-scarlet flicker of torii gates at the Kamigamo and Shimogamo shrines. Maybe that window looks eastward, towards the not-so-distant ocean, and I would see Mount Daimonji. Or I might see only the steel and glass wall of a neighboring skyscraper.

  I lie where I am and do not go to the window, and I stare up at the low plaster ceiling, the ugly water stains spread out there like bruises or melanoma or concentric geographical features on an ice moon of Saturn or Jupiter or Neptune. This whole goddamn building is rotten; I recall that much clearly enough. The ceiling of my room – if it is my room – has more leaks than I can count, and I think it’s not even on the top floor. The rain is loud against the window, but the dripping ceiling seems to my ears much louder, as each drop grows finally too heavy and falls to the ceramic tiles. I hear a distinct plink for each and every drop that drips down from the motel ceiling, and that plink does not quite seem to match what I recall about the sound of water dripping against tile.

  The paler-than-oyster sheets are damp, too. As are the mattress and box springs underneath. Why there are not mushrooms, I can’t say. There is mold, mold or mildew if there’s some difference between the two, because I can smell it, and I can see it. I can taste it.

  I lie here on my back and stare up at the leaky ceiling, listening to the rain, letting these vague thoughts ricochet through my incontinent skull. My mind leaks, too, I suspect, and in much the same way that this ceiling leaks. My thoughts and memories have stained the moldering sheets, discrete units of me drifting away in a slow flood of cerebrospinal fluid, my ears for sluice gates – or my eyes – Liquor cerebrospinalis draining out a few precious milliliters per day or hour, leaving only vast echoes in emptied subarachnoid cavities.

  She looks at me over her left shoulder, her skin as white as snow that never falls, her hair whiter still, her eyes like broken sapphire shards, and she frowns, knitting her white eyebrows. She is talking into the antique black rotary telephone, but looking at me, disapproving of these meandering, senseless thoughts when I have yet to answer her questions to anyone’s satisfaction. I turn away – the exact wrong thing to do, and yet I do it, anyway. I wish she would put some clothes on. Her robe is hanging on a hook not far away. I would get it for her, if she would only ask. She lights a cigarette, and that’s good, because now the air wrapped all about the bed smells less like the mold and poisonous rainwater.

  “We do the best we can,” she tells the telephone, whoever’s listening on the other end of the line, “given what we have to work with.”

  Having turned away, I lie on my left side, my face pressed into those damp sheets, shivering and wondering how long now since I have been genuinely warm. Wondering, too, if this season is spring or winter or autumn. I am fairly certain it is not summer. She laughs, but I don’t shut my eyes. I imagine that the folds and creases of the sheets are ridges and valleys, and I am the slain giant of some creation myth. My cerebrospinal fluid will form lakes and rivers and seas, and trees will sprout, and grass and ferns and lichen, and all that vegetation shall be imbued with my lost, or merely forfeited, memories. The birds will rise up from fancies that have bled from me.

  My breasts ache.

  Maybe that has some role to play in this cosmogony, the aching, swollen breasts of the fallen giantess whose mind became the wide white-grey world.

  “I need more time, that’s all,” the naked snow-coloured woman tells the black Bakelite handset. “There were so many more layers than we’d anticipated.”

  With an index finger I trace the course of one of the V-shaped sheet valleys. It gradually widens towards the foot of the bed, towards my own feet, and I decide that I shall arbitrarily call that direction south, as I arbitrarily think this motel might exist somewhere in Kyoto. Where it ends, there is a broad alluvial fan, this silk-cotton blend splaying out into flat deltas where an unseen river at last deposits its burden of mnemonic silt and clay and sand – only the finest particles make it all the way over the far away edge of the bed to the white-tile sea spread out below. Never meaning to, I have made a flat white-grey world. Beyond the delta are low hills, smooth ridges in the shadow of my knees. Call it an eclipse, that gloom; any shadow in this stark room is Divine.

  These thoughts are leading me nowhere, and I think now that they must exist only to erect a defence, this complete absence of direction. She has pried and stabbed and pricked that fragile innermost stratum of the meningeal envelope, the precious pia matter, and so triggered inside me these meandering responses. She thought to find only pliable grey matter waiting underneath, and maybe the answers to her questions – tap in, cross ref, download – but, no, here’s this damned firewall, instead. But I did not put it there. I am holding nothing back by choice. I know she won’t believe that, though it is the truth.

  “Maybe another twelve hours,” she tells the handset.

  I must be a barren, pitiless goddess, to have placed all those fluorescent tubes for a sun and nothing else. They shed no warmth from out that otherwise starless ivory firmament. Heaven drips to make a filthy sea, and she rings off and places the handset back into its Bakelite cradle. It is all a cradle, I think, this room in this motel in this city I cannot name with any certainty. Perhaps I never even left Manhattan or Atlanta or San Francisco.

  �
�I’m losing patience,” she says and sighs impatiently. “More importantly, they’re losing patience with me.”