by Anthology
Then prose: “It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our own—a fairy sea—a fairy sea . . .”
He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the Channel along the seafront that had borne us company so long leaped up a note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army—this renewed pulse of the sea—and filled our ears till they, accepting it, marked it no longer.
A fairyland for you and me
Across the foam—beyond . . .
A magic foam, a perilous sea.
He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there are no more than five—five little lines—of which one can say: “These are pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry.” And Mr. Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!
I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and re-repeating:—
A savage spot as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
But though I believed, my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brownfingered with chemicals and cigarette smoke.
Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,
(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then—
Our open casements facing desolate seas
Forlorn—forlorn—
Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was tenfold keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my hand.
Our windows facing on the desolate seas
And pearly foam of magic fairyland—
“Not yet—not yet,” he muttered, “wait a minute. Please wait a minute. I shall get it then—
Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
The dangerous foam of desolate seas..
For aye.
Ouh, my God!”
From head to heel he shook—shook from the marrow of his bones outwards—then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.
As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.
“I’ve had a bit of a doze,” he said. “How did I come to knock the chair over? You look rather—”
“The chair startled me,” I answered. “It was so sudden in this quiet.”
Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.
“I suppose I must have been dreaming,” said Mr. Shaynor.
“I suppose you must,” I said. “Talking of dreams—I—I noticed you writing—before—”
He flushed consciously.
“I meant to ask you if you’ve ever read anything written by a man called Keats.”
“Oh! I haven’t much time to read poetry, and I can’t say that I remember the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?”
“Middling. I thought you might know him because he’s the only poet who was ever a druggist. And he’s rather what’s called the lover’s poet.”
“Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?”
“A lot of things. Here’s a sample that may interest you.”
Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and once written not ten minutes ago.
“Ah! Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the tinctures and syrups. It’s a fine tribute to our profession.”
“I don’t know,” said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the door one half-inch, “if you still happen to be interested in our trifling experiments. But, should such be the case—” I drew him aside, whispering, “Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being rude, it wouldn’t do to take you off your instruments just as the call was coming through. Don’t you see?”
“Granted—granted as soon as asked,” he said, unbending. “I did think it a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?”
“I hope I haven’t missed anything,” I said.
“I’m afraid I can’t say that, but you’re just in time for the end of a rather curious performance. You can come in too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen, while I read it off.”
The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted: “ ‘K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals. A pause. “ ‘M.M. V.M.M. V. Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments tomorrow.’ ”Do you know what that means? It’s a couple of men-o’-war working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to each other. Neither can read the other’s messages, but all their messages are being taken in by our receiver here. They’ve been going on for ever so long. I wish you could have heard it.”
“How wonderful!” I said. “Do you mean we’re overhearing Portsmouth ships trying to talk to each other—that we’re eavesdropping across half South England?”
“Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear.”
“Why is that?”
“God knows—and Science will know tomorrow. Perhaps the induction is faulty; perhaps the receivers aren’t tuned to receive just the number of vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and there. Just enough to tantalize.” Again the Morse sprang to life.
“That’s one of ’em complaining now. Listen: ‘Disheartening—most disheartening.’ It’s quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic séance? It reminds me of that sometimes—odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere—a word here and there—no good at all.”
“But mediums are all impostors,” said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway, lighting an asthma-cigarette. “They only do it for the money they can make. I’ve seen ’em.”
“Here’s Poole, at last—clear as a bell. L.L.L. Now we shan’t be long.” Mr. Cashell rattled the keys merrily. “Anything you’d like to tell ’em?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll go home and get to bed. I’m feeling a little tired.”
WOMEN ON THE BRINK OF A CATACLYSM
Molly Brown
I felt like I was going through a meat grinder. Then there was a blinding flash of light—bright orange—and I felt like I was going through a meat grinder backwards. And there I was, back in one piece. Slightly dizzy, a little stiff around the joints. Swearing I’d never do that again.
The digital display inside the capsule read: 29 April 1995, 6:03 P.M. , E.S.T. If that was true, then I was furious. Toni promised she would only set the timer forward by two minutes, and I’d gone forward by a year! A whole year, wasted. Didn’t she realize I had work to do? And then I thought: oh my God, the exhibition! I was supposed to have an exhibition in July, 1994—if I’ve really gone forward a year, I missed my one-woman show at Gallery Alfredo!
I opened the capsule door, bent on murder. And then I froze. This wasn’t my studio.
I live and work on the top floor of an old wareh
ouse in lower Manhattan, and I do sculpture. Abstract sculpture. I take scrapped auto parts and turn them into something beautiful. I twist industrial rubbish into exquisite shapes. I can mount a bicycle wheel onto a wooden platform and make it speak volumes about the meaning of life. I once placed a headless Barbie doll inside a fish tank and sold it for five thousand dollars, and that was before I was famous—I hear the same piece recently fetched more than forty.
I’d been working on a new piece called “Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm”: an arrangement of six black and white television sets, each showing a video loop of a woman scrubbing a floor, when Toni Fisher rang the doorbell. I’ve known Toni off and on since we were kids. We grew up in the same town and went to the same high school before going our separate ways after graduation, in 1966. I went to art school in California; she got a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge in England. It would be twenty years before we met again, at the launch party for Gutsy Ladies: Women making their mark in the 80s, the latest book by Arabella Winstein.
It was one of those dreadful media circuses; I remember a PR woman in a geometric haircut dragging me around the room for a round of introductions: “Hey there, gutsy lady, come and meet some other gutsy ladies.” I was there in my capacity as “Gutsy Lady of the Art World” and Toni had been profiled in a chapter entitled: “Gutsy Lady on the Cutting Edge of Science”.
I saw her leaning against a wall in the corner: a tall, stick-thin character with spikey blonde hair, gulping champagne. I could see she was a kindred spirit—we were the only ones not wearing neat little suits with boxy jackets—but I had no idea who she was; in high school she’d been a chubby brunette with glasses. She saw me looking at her, and waved me over.
We leaned against the wall together, jangling the chains on our identical black leather jackets. “I’m working on a calculation,” she said, “that will show density of shoulder pad to be in directly inverse proportion to level of intelligence. I’m drunk by the way.”
“I’m Joanna Krenski.”
“I know who you are. I’ve still got the charcoal portrait you did of me for your senior year art project. The damn thing must be worth a fortune now; I keep meaning to get it valued.”
That was the start of our friendship, the second time around.
Eight years later, I was sitting inside this metal egg, surrounded by my work and my tools and the huge amount of dust they always seem to generate, and Toni was shouting, okay, push the button. Then I opened the capsule door and Toni was gone and all my work was gone and even the dust was gone.
I was in a huge, open-plan loft with floor to ceiling windows—that much was like my studio—but everything had been polished and swept and there were flowers everywhere. Flowers in vases, flowers in pots, flowers in a window-box. And then there were paintings of flowers. Dozens of delicate little water-colours depicting roses and lilies and lilacs completely covered one wall, each framed behind a pane of sparkling glass. Unframed oils on canvas stood leaning against every wall, apparently divided into categories: fluffy kittens, cute children, puppies with big sad eyes. I could have puked.
A woman was standing with her back to me, painting something on a medium-sized canvas mounted on a wooden easel. It looked like it was going to be another puppy. The woman had tightly permed hair cut just above the collar—mouse brown gone mostly grey—and she was wearing a white smock over a knee-length dress. I also noticed she was wearing high heels. To paint.
Oh God, I thought, just like my mother. I remembered her putting on a hat and a little string of pearls to attend her first evening art class; she was like something out of a ’50s TV sitcom. And how proud she was of her little pictures of birds. My mother used to paint birds: little red robins and yellow canaries, with musical notes coming out of their beaks. She hung them all over the living room walls. It was embarrassing.
I was going to have to handle this very carefully. The woman was obviously some old dear of my mother’s generation and I was a disembodied head sticking out of a metallic egg. I didn’t want to give the poor woman a heart attack. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me,” I said. “Please don’t be frightened. I’m not a burglar or anything.” Even as I said it, I realized how stupid it must have sounded: a burglar in a metal egg.
The woman swung around, and I gasped.
“You again,” she said, quite calmly. “I never expected you to turn up here.”
I felt my mouth open and close half a dozen times, but no words came out. I just sat there, inside the capsule, gaping like a mackerel. The woman had my face. She’d let her hair go grey—something I’ve refused to do—and she was wearing a string of pearls just like my mother’s and a dress I wouldn’t be caught dead in, but based on her face—and even her voice—she could have been my sister. My twin.
There was an odd smell in the air; I’d noticed it the moment I opened the capsule door and now I realized what it was. It was bread, baking. Something very strange was going on here.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she went on. “Toni said we were both stuck where we were. She was very apologetic about it, of course.” She put her palette and brush down on a table beside the easel, then crossed her arms and looked at me. She seemed angry. “Well, you can forget it.”
I finally managed to get my vocal cords working. “Huh? Forget what?”
“Even if you’ve found a way, I’m not going back,” she said. “No way am I going back. Ever. This is my life now, my world, and I like it. Though . . .” she paused a moment, and her face—my face—crumpled into a mass of lines. Oh God, I thought, I don’t look as old as her, do I? She blinked hard, several times, as if she was trying not to cry. “How’s Katie? Is she all right?”
I shook my head; the only Katie I knew was a drama critic, and I didn’t think that was who she meant.
“The boys I don’t worry about so much; they’re grown up now. I know they’ll be okay. But Katie . . . she’s just a kid, isn’t she?”
“Katie who? And who are you? I mean you look so much like . . . like my mother. Are we related or something?”
Her eyes opened wide. “You mean you don’t know? But . . . but you’ve been there. Isn’t that where you came from just now?”
“Been where?”
“But you must have! Or how could I be here?”
This woman was talking nonsense; I figured she must be crazy, maybe even dangerous. Maybe she was one of those fanatical fans who get plastic surgery to look like their idols. Okay, maybe a forty-five year-old sculptor doesn’t have that kind of fan. Even a forty-five year-old sculptor who appeared in two Warhol films and has had her picture on the cover of everything from Newsweek to Rolling Stone (twice), probably doesn’t have that kind of fan. I still figured the only thing for me to do was to get the hell away from her in a hurry.
I leaned forward, trying to pull myself out of the capsule, but she grabbed me by the shoulders, shoved me back down inside it, and held me there. I struggled and swore, but I couldn’t get up. I don’t think she was any stronger than me, but she had the major advantage of not being curled into an almost foetal position inside a metal egg.
Her face hovered inches above mine, mouth twisted with rage, eyes narrow and shining with something that might have been hate or might even have been fear; I couldn’t tell. It was like looking into one of those distorted fairground mirrors.
“But you have been there,” she insisted. “You arrived there a year ago today. That’s when the switch took place.”
“What switch?”
“This switch,” she said, slamming the capsule door down over my head.
It was worse the second time. My head was pounding; my whole body ached. It took a few seconds for my eyes to come back into focus—then I saw the digital display. I was back where I started; 29 April, 1994, 6:01 P.M. , E.S.T. I sighed with relief. I was home and I still had three months to get ready for my show at Gallery Alfredo; I hadn’t missed it after all.
I shoved the door open, expecting to
see my studio, and Toni waiting by the capsule. I had a few choice words in store for Toni! But she wasn’t there. And my studio wasn’t there.
I couldn’t tell where I was at first; it was dark. But as my eyes began to adjust, I saw that I was in a windowless room lined with crowded shelves.
“Hello!” I shouted. “Is anybody there?”
No answer.
“Shit.” I took a deep breath, gathered all my strength, and slowly began to extricate myself from Toni’s infernal machine. I never felt so stiff and sore; I could hardly move. My jeans felt tighter than usual, as if my body was swollen. And my poor legs! I had to massage them to get the blood moving again, and then there was an unbearable sensation of pins and needles. I finally managed to stand up.
The shelves around me were stacked with jars of homemade preserves and chocolate chip cookies. There were bags of flour, a tinned baked ham, fresh coffee beans, baskets of fruit and vegetables, various pots and pans. It looked like some kind of a pantry.
I reached for the door, praying it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t, and I stepped into a kitchen that would have been the height of technology in 1956. The brand names were all ones I remembered from my childhood, the appliances were all big and white and clunky, except for the toaster, which was small and round and covered in shiny chrome, and the coffee percolator, which was switched on and bubbling away.
There was nothing in that room that would have been out of place when I was five years old. No microwave oven, no food processor, no espresso machine. There was a meat grinder and a coffee grinder, each with a handle you needed to crank. You needed a match to light the stove. You had to defrost the fridge.
And it was all brand new.
“Hello! Anybody home?” I wandered through the dining room—a printed sign on the wall above the sideboard read, “Give us this day our daily bread”—and into a living room with a picture window and clear plastic covers over all the furniture. An embroidered sampler above the fireplace proclaimed, “Bless this house and everyone in it.” I shook my head.