3.
When she dreams, which she doesn’t do as often as she once did, the tall woman with ash blonde hair and her nails chewed down to their quicks always dreams the same dream, which is the dream of the wide clean beach and the high cliffs, the sand and sky and red-brown boulders at the edge of the sea. She’s playing alone in the surf and hears music, a merry, lilting sort of music, clear and crystal notes tumbling one against the next and carried along on the salty wind. And, being a curious creature, the music draws her up and out of herself, out of the waves, finally even out of her skin, and she stands in the brilliant morning sunlight. The boy is seated cross-legged on one of the larger boulders, so intent upon the positions of his fingers, upon their quick, precise movements and the sounds they are coaxing from his instrument, that he doesn’t notice her at first. So she stands very still, with the saltwater lapping at her bare ankles, and listens.
She’s seen human boys before, of course, on the decks of the fishing boats and ferries that come and go between the small rocky islands, but she’s never seen one half so handsome, and never once did she imagine they might be capable of making such beautiful music. His hair is long and black, as black as the slender stick he’s pressing to his lips, the black stick with silver keys that he’s using to make the music, some sort of pipe, some strange man-made thing. When she takes another step towards him, he stops playing and looks up at her.
“Hello,” he says and smiles.
She doesn’t answer him, even though she understands and even though she knows well enough how to speak in all the tongues of men. She stands very still, watching and waiting for him to finish staring at her and go back to making his music.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asks and points at her with his black and silver pipe.
“I don’t mind the cold,” she says, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the wind, and she takes a hesitant step or two nearer the boulder where he’s seated. She knows to be wary of men, because her mother has told her stories about the slaughter of seals, about the wooden clubs and steel knives and stolen hides, and she’s seen the rotting carcasses and the bleached white bones to prove all the stories true.
“No,” he says, and winks his left eye at her. “I don’t suppose you do,” and then the boy presses the pipe to his lips and brings the music back again. It flows over her and through her and fills her in some way that she’s never been filled before, satiating some terrible hunger she’s never even known she had. It makes her want to dance, and she laughs and spins about and kicks at the sea. She tries to catch each note and hold it, freeze it forever in her memory before it’s gone and replaced by the next and then the next after that. But it’s like trying to hold a warm summer wind or the flickering shafts of sunlight slanting down through kelp into the deep places between the islands. No, she thinks. It’s like trying to capture time, and the thought makes her sad, so she pushes it away and tries hard to think of nothing but the human boy’s beautiful, sweet music moving all about her like the arms of the sea.
And what happens next is never quite the same thing twice, as though the truth of that day is more than she can bear to remember exactly and whole, so in her sleep she can only whisper less monstrous variations, a shifting torrent of falsehoods that she’s spun to stand in for the day itself. No more or less true than her pale face reflected in still water or a looking glass, and what’s the difference, when the dreams all end the same way? How can the details ever matter, if the conclusion is inescapable?
This happens, or this, or this other thing, and then the music stops and the boy has come down off his rock. He’s standing on the beach, and in one hand he holds his piccolo (which, she’s since learned, is what men call the black stick with silver keys) and in the other he holds her empty skin. He’s still smiling, but this is another sort of smile. This is the smile of a shark or a hungry eel or the men who murder seals to steal their fur. This is a hard, triumphant smile, a smile to say he has what he came for. A smile so she can never forget she’s been tricked.
“I hadn’t thought it would be so easy,” he says, and she begs him to give it back to her, weeps and pleads and goes down on her knees before he stops smiling and turns and walks away towards the cliffs. At first, she’s too frightened to follow, remembering the old tales of stolen skins and her sisters and grandmothers who were forced to marry human men and bear their children and grow old and die and be buried in the stony earth like potatoes. She climbs up onto his boulder, naked and human to anyone without the eyes to see her true self trapped there inside. She doesn’t take her eyes from him, and after a time the boy’s only a small speck where the land turns green at the top of the cliffs, and then, a moment later, he’s nothing at all.
4.
She imagined that it would smell like death inside the little shop—GREYE’S ANATOMY (SINCE 1962)—and is surprised when there’s only the smell of dust and old books and a very faint hint of jasmine incense. There’s a single aisle leading from the door back to the cash register, a narrow aisle lined with glass-fronted wooden museum eases filled with skulls and skeletons that stare sightlessly out at her. There are pickled things floating in jars of formalin—lizards from tropical rainforests, bats from Mexican caves, salamanders from icy Chinese streams. There are brilliant rainbows of butterflies and enormous iridescent beetles and hairy tarantulas sealed up tight inside shadow-box coffins. There’s a bowl heaped with pigs’ teeth, a necklace strung from the vertebrae of a boa constrictor, bracelets made from the wiry hair of an elephant’s tail, a paperweight fashioned from a chunk of petrified wood. The door jingles shut behind her, and the tall, thin woman gazes back at the flat acrylic eyes of a taxidermied bobcat, its jaws permanently set into a snarl or a hiss. Behind it are shelves crowded with fossil bones and pyritized brittle stars on oily slabs of black German slate, the skull of a small dinosaur brought here from the deserts of Mongolia, and the delicate carbonized imprints of feathers and leaves and insects. All around her, the stuffed, pickled, silicified captives of this silent menagerie seem to be warning her she should turn back now, that she should run, before she finds herself drifting in a corked bottle or pinned down flat or stuffed with sawdust.
The man sitting behind the counter looks up from his newspaper and smiles.
“If there’s anything I can help you with,” he says, “just let me know.”
“Yes,” she replies, her voice breathless and unsteady, and she manages to look away from the bobcat, but there’s no place safe for her dark eyes to linger, no corner of the little shop that doesn’t hold some terrible artifact or lifeless husk. She spies the skeleton of a dodo bird, wired together and held upright with metal rods, and she reads the brass plaque on its oak stand: The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), Family Raphidae, Island of Mauritius, Indian Ocean.
“Is this real?” she asks the man, and he stops reading his newspaper again, glances up at her and shakes his head. His hair is auburn, and there’s a small patch of auburn beard on his chin, auburn stubble on his cheeks. His eyes are blue, the easy, disarming blue of late summer skies above the skerries.
“Are you a collector?” he asks.
She thinks of the shells and pebbles in her coat pockets, the bits and pieces of here and there she’s gathered in her travels. “Yes,” she says. “After a fashion.”
The blue-eyed man lays his newspaper on the counter and rubs at his forehead. “Well, some of the spinal column’s actual bone, and the right femur. That’s real, too. But the rest is resin, cast from bones in a Dutch museum. It’s a very accurate restoration. We’re quite picky about our merchandise.”
She looks at him a moment, then turns back to the dodo skeleton, a few precious bones the color of charcoal and all the rest only deceitfully painted scraps of plastic. There’s a price tag dangling from the bird’s left wing, and she reads it aloud. “Is that a fair price?” she asks the man, and he shrugs.
“Well, I figure fair’s in the eye of the beholder, or at least in the depth of the beholder
’s pockets. It’s one of a kind, top-notch craftsmanship. Our preparators are some of the best. And you won’t easily find another like it outside an auction house.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” she says, and thinks again about retracing her steps back to the shop’s green door, and then back across Columbus Avenue, and maybe she’d keep going until the city was far behind her.
“So, is there something else you’d like to see?” the man asks. “You said you’re a collector. What exactly is it that you fancy?” And the second question reminds her of the brown old man who wasn’t an old man, the spectacles perched on his nose, his ratty overcoat.
Mind the difference between the way things seem and the way things are...
“I am looking for something,” the woman says, and she turns to face the man behind the counter. “Something very dear to me. I’ve come a long way to find it. But I don’t see it here anywhere.” The man chews at a thumbnail a moment, watching her, his expression gone suddenly uncertain and guarded, and she suspects he’s about to ask her to leave. Perhaps, he thinks that she’s insane. Perhaps, he only thinks she’s wasting his time and wants to get back to his paper, if she doesn’t intend to buy the dodo bird. But then he nods his head very slowly and motions to the curtain behind him, heavy green cloth almost the same shade as the door.
“This is just the showroom,” he says. “Perhaps we have what you’re looking for in the back. If you told me a little more—”
“A sealskin,” she says, and her voice seems to fall like ice from her lips. She can almost hear those three syllables striking the hardwood floor of Greye’s Anatomy and shattering. She swallows back the cold and waits for whatever the man will say next.
“I’m sorry. We’re not a furrier. But if you—”
“It would have come from Scotland, originally,” she tells him, and takes another step along the aisle towards the counter. “From Shapinsay in the Orkney Islands. It was ... collected there, almost a decade ago. To your eyes, it would seem only the hide of any common seal.
“Pboca vitulina,” the man says, and the Latin sounds like an incantation, something meant to drive her away from the little shop, a spell to banish her like a troublesome ghost or an autumn gale.
“To your eyes,” she says again.
The auburn-haired man scratches at his neck, at a spot just beneath his left ear, not taking his eyes off the tall, thin woman in her dingy coat and green galoshes.
“Like I said, we’re not a furrier. Who needs all that crazy PETA crap, right? Fuckers flinging red paint at people and all that shit. But... it just so happens, today might just be your lucky day.”
“And why is that?” she asks him, speaking very softly now. She’s come much too far to ever allow herself to hope. She will not dare to think she’s found it, not after all these years, to imagine that there’s anything waiting for her behind that green curtain but disappoint and another dead end.
“You’re not a cop, right? Sorry, but I have to ask you that.”
“No,” she says. “I’m not a cop. It was a family heirloom, that’s all. It was my mother’s, before me,” and the man nods his head, then he smiles again and folds his newspaper away before leading her through the green curtain to the shadowy place beyond.
5.
“I know it’s back here somewhere,” the man says, and then he lifts a heavy stack of antique books and folios from a rusty metal folding chair and puts them down on the floor. “You have a scat, and I’ll bring it to you... if I can remember where I last saw the damned thing.”
She nods her head and sits, trying hard to keep her eyes trained oil the bare concrete at her feet. If anything, it’s worse back here than it was in the front of the shop. There’s no sunlight on this side of the green curtain, only stark and colorless fluorescence from a fixture hung on chairs by four hooks set into the high ceiling, light that’s hardly real light at all. She starts to shut her eyes, then decides the darkness would be even worse.
“I swear I saw it just the other day,” the man tells her. “I was moving some stock around to make room for a new shipment and came across it. So, yeah, it can’t have gotten far,” and he laughs to himself.
There’s a long table beneath the light fixture, jumbled with unfinished taxidermies and more old books, gooseneck lamps, and the shattered fragments of an enormous fossilized tortoise shell that’s only been half reassembled. The man’s standing on the far side of the table now, shifting crates and boxes about and mumbling to himself.
“Why did you want to know if I was a cop?” she asks him, and he stops and looks over his shoulder at her.
“You can never be too careful,” he replies. “We’ve had cops show up before. FBI, customs agents, US Fish and Wildlife, all sorts. Not that anything back here’s illegal, not strictly speaking, but it’s best to keep the badges in the showroom, unless they’ve got warrants. Of course, that’s happened, too. Fuckers seem to think any place with human skulls in the window must be up to something illicit.”
“People should always mind the difference between the way things seem and the way things are,” she says, wishing that the brown man had crossed the street and come into the shop with her, wishing that she’d thought to ask him if he would.
“Ain’t that the goddamned truth,” the red headed man says. And then he squats down out of sight, vanishing below the edge of the table and all its curious burdens. “Ah-ha! There you are,” he says, and she’s about to get up from the rusty folding chair to see what he’s found, if it can possibly be what she doesn’t dare hope it is, when he stands up again. He has his arms wrapped about a small chest, wood almost as dark as chocolate, rotting leather straps and one of the latches broken off, and he’s straining to lift it onto an edge of the table that is only piled with papers and anatomical diagrams.
“But I’m not looking for a chest,” she says, already disappointed, because clearly the man hasn’t understood. “A sealskin. I’m looking for a sealskin.”
But he shakes his head and tells her to be patient, then flips up the one remaining latch. There’s a dull thap of iron against hollow wood, and the hinges creak loudly as he lifts the lid. “This belonged to a cousin of mine, on my father’s sick,” he tells her. “He died a couple of years ago. AIDS, complications from AIDS. I’m not sure what they put on the death certificate. We were friends when I was a kid.”
“And this belonged to him?” she asks, and now she does stand up, though she still can’t see what’s inside the trunk because the open lid is obscuring her view.
“This and a whole lot of other useless crap. He was a trust-fund baby, and he was also a packrat, which always makes for an interesting combination.”
“I’m not looking for a chest,” she says again. “I have no need of a chest.”
“Yeah,” the man sighs, and he glances up at her. “I know that. But what was it you said just a moment ago? That people need to know the difference between the way things appear and the way things really are?” And then he raises one eyebrow and motions for her to walk around the table and see for herself.
“Truth be told,” he says, “I’ve almost thrown this thing out once or twice. Thought about taking the flute to a pawnshop, but figured I couldn’t get much for it. You’re fortunate that I’m the sentimental sort, and a bit of a packrat myself.”
And then she’s standing next to the man, gazing down at the chest and refusing to believe what she sees there. A velvety pelt, fur that’s all the gentle colors of storm clouds, darker and lighter shades of grey, shot through with small patches of pure black, a sealskin, rolled into a tight bundle and filling the bottom of the chest. And on top of the pelt, there’s a piccolo.
“It’s not a flute,” she says.
“Whatever. I’m not a musician. In the will, Garrison said he thought maybe I could get a few bucks for it. For the skin, I mean, because I’d loaned him money a couple times and he’d never paid me back. But I’m afraid it’s not in very good shape, and, like I said, I’m
not a furrier. Supposedly, he picked it up somewhere in Scotland, back in the nineties, but I never knew if that part was true or not. He always liked to embellish, when it came to his odd bits of junk.”
“I’ve traveled so far,” she whispers, and then has to close her eyes, her head filled suddenly with the roar of wind rushing around the headlands and out across the sea, with the crash of breakers against the beach, the raucous cries of the guillemots and gulls soaring overhead. She can smell the sunshine and the salt and seaweed, and she can feel the cold water flowing all about her, taking her back, taking her down to her lost sisters and brothers, to submarine cannons of sand and silt and the broken masts of sunken ships. Behind her eyelids, there are darting seal shadows and the silver-scale flash of a school of herring moving quickly through gently swaying forests of kelp, and the thin woman gasps at the sweet and living taste of a codfish on her tongue.
“Are you okay?” the man asks, and he sounds concerned, but she doesn’t open her eyes. “Should I get the chair? You’re not about to go and faint on me, are you?”
“No, I’m fine,” she assures him, which is true. For the first time in ten years, for the first time since she heard the piccolo that brilliant morning at Veantro Bay and allowed the sound of it lure her from the water and even from her skin, she is fine.
“And you’re telling me this is what you were looking for?” the man asks, and she can hear the skepticism in his voice and that, finally, makes her open her eyes. “The heirloom? This nappy old sealskin belonged to your mother, and you’ve come all the way from Scotland just to find it?”
“Yes,” she says, and reaches into the chest, expecting the pelt to vanish before her fingers can reach it. But it doesn’t vanish, and she stands stroking the short, soft fur, only half believing that she isn’t still standing on the other side of Columbus Avenue, only imagining that shell ever find the courage to cross the street and open the green door beneath the black-and-white sign.
The Ammonite Violin & Others Page 4