by Dan Vyleta
It has no lock.
Inside rules a strange mixture of opulence and devastation. Smith has not so much “decorated” as torn through its furnishings. The books have been cleared off their shelves and stacked into towers or simply thrown onto corner mounds to make space for boxes and files, ribbon-tied piles of papers. Smith has taken down all the pictures and leaned them carelessly against the side of the desk. The wallpaper must have displeased him, for he has torn down much of it and covered other sections with a dazzling variety of maps, rudely nailed into the wall. The desk itself is tidy, organised. A gramophone balances on the windowsill, its flared horn pointing at the back of the office chair. In one corner, a large sofa has been made up into a bed. Shirts and underwear litter the floor; a washbowl of stale grey water balances on a heavy-limbed armchair; the chamber pot next to it has been emptied but not cleaned. The whole room is massive, dishevelled, bent to one man’s unforgiving habits. A tub of beard oil, though sealed, spreads its musky sweetness through the air.
All this Nil has witnessed from the door, letting the hallway’s lights illuminate the scene. He now closes it, walks soundless across the softness of the oriental carpets; heads to the windows, shuts the blinds, then turns on the desk lamp, moving as simply and swiftly as though he were walking in his own room.
A detail catches his attention. It rises from the ornamental chest that serves as bedside table to the sofa: a framed photograph, conspicuous because it has been perched atop another, folded facedown in a neat pantomime of usurpation. It shows a woman and a boy, presumably Smith Junior, eight years old, his father’s bulk echoed in puppy fat. The woman is thin and careworn. She does not condescend to smile.
And next to her, as though cause and object of her sternness, there rises a glass casement, lead-bottomed and nearly a foot in height. Inside resides a beetle on a spit. A nail really, seven inches long and slender, entering the beetle’s body at its sloping bottom, where winged back meets segmented belly, and emerging on the far side in between mandibles long and spiky like a crown of thorns. But what a beetle! Palm-sized, spread-winged, horned legs splayed and resting on the walls of its glass cage. Armoured in dull black. Its single mark of colour is the coarse speck of fur that sprouts underneath the triangular head, wasp yellow. A warning: the crescent shape much like a mouth. Frowning.
Nil starts. Stares from woman and child to beetle and back; expects a sudden wiggle of its legs. What disturbs him is not the thing itself but the monstrous nature of the juxtaposition. What breed of man travels the world with a picture of a family and the armoured husk of an exotic bug; feels compelled to position them side by side, within easy reach for nighttime contemplation, for tender greetings at the start of each fresh day?
But there is more to it yet. It comes with a delay, has to be unearthed, as though with a shovel. First, a word rises to his mind, his lips. “N’tib.” Nil says it and says it again, his mouth recalling a position, a movement of the tongue not needed for any English word.
“N’tib.”
He does not know what it means.
Once spoken, the word cannot be forgotten; wakes something in his chest. It stirs in him, childhood-deep. The time before memory: his stomach heaving, his vision blurred. The glass casement, snatched up, won’t open in his clumsy hands; slips, rolls on the soft of the carpet. He chases it, genuflecting, to the foot of the sofa; wrestles with the glued-on lid; and shatters the glass not with his right hand’s clawing but the pressure of his left hand’s grip: blood pooling between skin and insect fur as he pulls the beetle off its spit and cradles it against his cheek.
[ 12 ]
He must have smoked. He did not notice it, but the cuts on his hands are clogged with Soot, the beetle in his hands dusted with spent emotion. Nil himself feels brittle, used up.
Habit inserts itself into the hollowness of the moment. He rises and, this monstrous piece of childhood still cupped against his chest, starts making an inventory of valuables within the room. There is money in the desk drawer, coins and banknotes in a range of currencies that Nil stuffs into a pouch sewn into the inside of his trousers. The paperweight is made of gilded brass, the picture frame of solid silver. But Nil’s heart is not in it, is pounding in his chest, hounded by the thought that the vermin and he once shared the same forest floor. Something less than a memory: his crouching amongst ferns, watching a black scuttle. He cannot dispel it, opens desk drawers without looking at their contents, shuffles through letters he is too shaken to read.
Then a new detail registers on his burglar’s eye, an incongruity. There is a built-in closet in the room, marked by a narrow door. He was going to have a look through it as a matter of course but judged it to hold no special promise. Now Nil sees that it is padlocked. It is a flimsy lock, just good enough to keep out the cleaner, but a lock nonetheless. Its brackets have been crudely—recently—installed.
Nil walks over at once. One hand does not suffice to pick the lock, so he places the beetle on the thick carpet, then opens the door in a matter of seconds. Inside the closet, he finds an overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat made of pig’s leather; a rifle case, a worsted suit, a belt with cartridges and holstered pistols; a stack of paintings wrapped in newspapers and cloth. On the floor, half hidden behind a pair of stout boots, there sits something very much like a cake tin or a metal hatbox. The lid is screwed on and perforated by a dozen pinpricks, each like a pockmark on the polish of the lid.
Pinpricks.
Breathing holes.
Gingerly, his hands suddenly clumsy, tongue twisting around a single, awkward word, Nil reaches for the box. He finds it light though clearly not empty, a lump of weight at its base. Too cautious to open the lid, he pulls the box out of the closet and places it on the carpet; kneels down and presses his ear, his cheek, to its top. Nothing: the metal cool against his skin, the ridges of the pinholes like a rash of burrs upon his cheek. It is only when Nil lifts up the box—carefully, keeping the box level as though it were filled with water; the lid still safely in its place—and places his ear to the smoothness of its bottom that he makes it out: a sudden burst of little taps as six horned feet drum their pattern into the tin. And for the first time since entering the building, Nil is afraid. Afraid not of the box and its contents but of being caught; of losing this singular key to the mystery of his origins and reverting forever to the boy who has neither home nor nature, who is nothing but the sum of his needs.
He rises, clutching the box, and forgets about everything but the need to leave. A minute later he is walking down the stairs: is walking, not running, because he must not stumble and cannot afford to exhaust his breath. Twenty-three floors, he counts them by the landings, notes the transition when he must be passing the blank of the scar, with its rot and carbolic and milky light. On the ground floor, Nil ignores the locked and guarded front entrance and chooses instead the door separating the entrance hall from the back of the building, bolted against entry but not exit. Ten minutes later, he slips out the window of a cluttered communal office whose heavy window grille can be unscrewed from the inside. As the quality of air changes, the tin stirs in his hands: a sudden, panicked pulse. Nil listens, strokes the lid, catching a finger on a breathing hole; elicits an answering tremour, a tattoo. He walks briskly, clutching the box tightly to his chest.
It is as though he is carrying his heart.
THE PEOPLE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA, MINETOWNS. DRAFT ENTRY: “GALE.” DRAFT SUBMITTED TO WORKERS’ COUNCIL, FOR DISCUSSION AND APPROVAL, JUNE 1907.
Gale (also: “Smoke winds”; “emotional weather”):
A surviving fragment of Second Smoke, crisscrossing the land. It can be tinted or almost clear but even then is visible as a density within the air. A Gale’s prevailing temper varies according to the quality of the Soot feeding it. Sites of grave crime or suffering, when quickened, produce angry (“salty”) Gales that can precipitate violence in those caught up in th
em. The greater frequency of Gales in the North as opposed to the South may be attributed to the historically greater proportion of workingmen and -women in the North; since workers’ lives were, at the time of oppression, blighted by immeasurably greater suffering than the soft lives of the privileged, the Soot deposits of the North are darker and more plentiful, providing the Gales with greater resources of fuel. Gales have been reported in Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, Russia, the Baltics, though not generally farther south than the Alps. No fresh reports of Gales beyond the British Isles have been received in several years.
See also Storm; Gale Chaser.
THE PEOPLE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA, MINETOWNS. REDACTED DRAFT ENDORSED BY THE WORKERS’ COUNCIL’S SUBCOMMITTEE FOR WORKERS’ EDUCATION, JULY 1907.
Storm (also: “Black Storm”; “Black Gale”):
Southern propaganda term for a particularly ill-tempered Gale blamed for all manner of mischief.
See also Gale.
TALENT
[ 1 ]
They have put up the tent at the southern edge of Central Park. The Big Scar, that’s what people here call it. It’s an old English circus tent, dating from a time when theatre was forbidden but the display of animals was not. When the sun hits the fabric you can still smell them, the lions and tigers and dancing bears: rising like ghosts, like yesterday’s farts; urine, musk, and fur. Two weeks in the city and the sun has been out every day. It is as hot as if it were August. This is New York: a furnace full of strangers, vivid with stinks.
Eleanor fell in love with it at once.
It is for her a moment of unprecedented freedom. Already Saint John—her home for so many years—feels distant; already the fear of discovery, grown unbearable in the weeks after Cruikshank’s death, has fallen away and been dismissed as overwrought. Cruikshank told her they were hunted; that her uncle’s reach went far; that her papers would not bear official scrutiny. Here, in the city, anonymised, the fears feel far-fetched. How easy after all was her escape! Balthazar clapped his hands like a magician. And there she was, absorbed into his troupe.
She has met them all, of course: tall, quick-witted Victor who hides a rash of pimples underneath his stage paint; and beautiful Ada, so flighty she talks and smokes in one incessant tide. Kolya and Pavla, the Shapers, who spend all their free time bent over a game of chess. Edie and Tomaso, stagehands and mechanicals. Geoffrey, the set painter who plays Thomas in the final scene: a squat, quiet bruiser of a boy, his clothes so dirty they hang stiff from his frame. Peter, Yves, and handsome David, whom she first knew as make-believe fishermen singing a humble welcome to the Smoke; Greta Silvana Nemec, from Montreal via Budapest and Prague, who insists on her full name and is too important to speak to Eleanor for any length of time; and Meister Lukas who has a Chinese face to go with his German name and is so very shy he daren’t look her in the eye. They are all sequestered in the same once-grand, now-shabby hotel near the Great Scar where they live with the intimacy of family, or of soldiers at war.
All the same, a certain distance governs their and Eleanor’s relations. Eleanor lives with the players but does not quite belong to them; has been welcomed but not assimilated. She is what she has always been: an awkward girl, living at the margins of other people’s lives, her only role within the troupe the passing out of flyers around town.
The flyers are Balthazar’s design. COME AND SEE SMOKE’S PLAYERS, they read, NOW PERFORMING A NEW PROGRAMME OF PLAYS AND TABLEAUX. BUY A TICKET AND BE AMAZED. At their bottom, a pencil scrawl discloses their location and exhorts visitors to COME BRING YOUR SINS.
“Where shall I put these?” she asked when Balthazar handed them over to her along with a pot of glue and a coarse brush.
“Everywhere, Miss Cruikshank. Try not to get yourself killed.”
[ 2 ]
And so she walks the city every day, from the edge of the Big Scar to the southern tip of the peninsula where a group of towers rise like fingers, up above the haze. The city is paved, hard on her feet; laid out in endless rulered lines. She learns its geography, each clutch of city blocks a little nation bounded by wasteland or a strip of orchard, by piles of rubbish or barley fields, by shade trees planted in long tidy rows. Eleanor sticks flyers to walls, lampposts, and shop doors; passes them out to butchers, grocers, and tobacconists; is offered tea and schnapps and still-warm oxblood; is propositioned, chased, or cheered by men and women of all colours and all creeds.
Wherever she goes, she hears things, reads things. Politics, gossip, sex. That in New England, where the Second Smoke never reached, there are Puritan villages where man and wife sleep in separate buildings and visit only once a month. That the United States is fragmented, united only by name; that a second civil war is looming and the dollar not worth shit. That China has thrown all foreigners out of its ports and Switzerland has banned the use of sweets upon pain of death. She sees her first motorcar and watches men ride through the skies in a balloon; listens to musicians on street corners playing a music of such abandon that people dance smoking in the street; walks under a garland of roasted ducks in Chinatown, strung up above the street to absorb a seasoning of Soot; and is chased by dog packs through the withered scrubland of a scar.
But no matter how far Eleanor wanders or how absorbed she becomes in the spectacle of the city, in the hot hours of the afternoon, halfway between noon and dusk, she embarks on the long walk back to the players’ tent. Nightfall marks the rise of the curtain. In a city without public clocks it is the most sensible of conventions. Besides, Balthazar likes the dark. Unlike the sun, stage light is something he can shape. When the audience is admitted and the lamps are lit; when the hush falls over the public and the tent fills with the pre-Smoke of expectation; when a single beam picks out an actor or an object, transforming them from something everyday into a receptacle brimful with revelation—Eleanor is there, tucked in amongst the crowd.
She knows most of the repertoire by now, knows the actors’ gestures, the props and bits of stage magic. It does not seem to matter. The experience is new every time, the Smoke ever shifting, a matter of the actors’ moods, the make-up of the audience, the air pressure and the phase of the moon. People come from all over the city and beyond: a group of railway workers from Pennsylvania who stay three nights though they have money for only a single show; a perfumed uptown dandy with a made-up crest pinned to his cravat; a Boston magistrate’s widow, travelling with two young Poles, each (it is said) a husband to her on alternate days; a towering Jew, sweating in his heavy hat of sable furs. Eleanor mingles Smoke with all of them, is soiled by some and ennobled by others, samples emotions far from her ken. The theatre absorbs her in its drama and its crowd; returns her to a sense of self seeded by the ghosts of others.
And how different they seem to her, these others, when they spill through the tent flaps at the end of the show: no longer strangers but relations, each as though chasing their own shadow, splayed huge and nebulous by the stage lights at their backs.
“Rushing home like they left porridge on the hob,” Balthazar scoffs. “Hoping they will remember who they are. That their wallpaper, the neighbour’s snore, will remind them.”
“Don’t laugh,” Eleanor hears Etta May scold him. “You have no right. It’s you who makes them lose themselves.”
“What, I am a thief now? A will-o’-the-wisp? Leading people onto treacherous ground.”
“A coward,” she scolds, “always hiding behind your screen. You are the boy who never plays but thinks he knows the rules.”
He spits and calls her names. “Minx,” “cretin,” “pan guts.” “More arse on you than brains, and a mouth bigger than either.”
For all his sour words, Balthazar’s Smoke is hesitant and mild.
[ 3 ]
One detail has changed about the performances. They no longer finish in a fever. Whatever it was that Balthazar
did to provide current, conductivity, to the Smoke released in the players’ final scene, he now omits. At first Eleanor felt a sharp stab of loss at this omission, complained of it to an unmoved Balthazar. The alternate ending is not without pleasure, however. It leaves the auditorium trading in a light, subtle Smoke carrying flavours of a kind commonly obscured by stronger passions. It is a hushed, prayerful mood that spreads: each sense straining for the Smoke, the connection to the others gentle, light as silk. Something else, too. Eleanor has noticed that there are, in these final moments, points of density within the crowd, places where a single person becomes the centre of gravity within their corner of the room; has noticed, too, that she is one such centre. Afterwards—when the players have taken their applause, and the fans have been turned on, dispersing the last of the Smoke—it has become common for people to walk up to her, to touch her sleeve, her hand. Women curtsy; men slip off their caps and stand kneading them between their hands. Eleanor receives these tributes impassively, unsurprised and a little resentful. She has always been different.
It troubles her.
[ 4 ]
She takes her trouble to Etta May. She could talk to Balthazar, of course, but his manner with her retains an edge of hostility. It is as though he is angry at something that she is making him do. She and Etta May have a simpler relationship. They became acquainted on the boat journey where they shared a minuscule cabin, a space confined enough to dream each other’s sleeping Smoke. A woman half flirt, half matron; her speech slow and honeyed, like she’s savouring each word. She hails from Virginia, Balthazar told Eleanor when first introducing them. “Smell it? Her people’s perfume: tobacco and nostalgia, for when they had slaves.” The two like each other, Eleanor has gathered, and express it through the trading of unkind truths.