The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  The irony is not lost on me. It never is.

  I can hear the Barker’s grin, and then the air around me and my contraption and my stool and the sand-filled hourglass beneath my bare feet trembles at his words.

  If what he sees here displeases him, the Barker explains, if the wheel bears forth some perversity too distasteful or not at all to his liking, why, he’s always free to move along. If he cannot bear the sight of a thing—if, perchance, it strikes too close to home or rings too true—he knows the drill. I would have it no other way, as so refined a palate must never be forced to tolerate that which has been poorly prepared or presented.

  The boy in the mirror admires his hairless chest, his polished nails, his high cheekbones. If he only had a twin—

  And I flip the switch.

  The machine does as I’ve asked, and the wheel spins, or it’s only me that spins, and the pretty, preening boy and his looking glass are immediately swept from view.

  And I would turn away, would finally shut my eyes and find merciful darkness there to ease this relentless pounding in my chest. My mouth is drier than the hourglass sands, and it’s been that dry as long as I can remember, not the meanest drop of spit left between my chapped lips and parched tongue. Oh, there is water, if I want it. There is a tall glass of crystal water always within easy reach. But there is no time to drink, and there is no time to turn away. There is only the carnival’s contraption radiating all around me as it does, and these endless windows which are its hollow promises. There is only the ache between my legs and the constant craving...

  One grain of sand falls, a descent that seems to go on for hours while the Barker roars and rages and the calliope wails. I hear autumn wind ruffling at the gaff banners and smell candy apples and popcorn and spilled beer. I smell the horses and the elephants. In this instant, I would gladly trade places with some simpler carny freak—Tom Thumb or the bearded lady, the Siamese Twins or the pinhead or that albino knot of stillborn flesh floating blind in its jar of spirits. I might be only something which is seen, only another sideshow geek or fakir, a tattooed fire eater or sword swallower selling Bibles and signed photos to the marks and mooches and lot lice.

  Click.

  I dutifully press the green switch with my thumb, and all thoughts of escape or compromise are immediately lost to me. For here is something else that I have never seen or even imagined, something I must see, for one day or night there will finally be that scene that will pacify and satiate my gluttonous hunger. They call it faith, to believe such things.

  The Barker is pleased. I still hear his grin, but it no longer hurts to hear. It no longer grates like braking locomotive wheels grinding rails. His grin no longer throws molten sparks.

  —A woman sits nude at the center of an empty room that has been painted the colour of a ripe pomegranate—walls, ceiling, doors, window casings, and the floor. The paint is still wet, and she sits on the last remaining unpainted patch of hardwood floor, her legs pulled up close to her chest, her arms tight around her knees. There is a terrible scar on her face, a keloid slash that might be the legacy of a burn or a knife or a razor or the jaws of a wild beast. I could not tell you which. Before the scar, she might have been pleasing to the eye, but somehow I sense that the real mutilation here is not so superficial. Something’s torn apart inside her, something ripped asunder, some private, lonely wound.

  Nothing she does not deserve, she would say, if I could ask. Nothing I didn’t have coming to me after what I did. Her thoughts are the same shade of red as the drying paint.

  There are two open buckets beside her, one empty and the other half full. There’s a pool of paint inside a metal tray, and a brush, and a roller. She touches a fingertip to the damp pomegranate floor and stares a while at the stain this contact leaves on her flesh. And then she takes the roller from its tray and begins on her legs and thighs...

  Red switch. Sand grain. Click. Green switch.

  I wind another crank, and the binoculars are soon replaced by an 1861 Holmes stereoscope. Not just any 1861 Holmes stereoscope, not the way the Barker tells it, but one that once belonged to Madam Helena Blavatsky herself, one infused with special mystical properties by Hindu swamis and Tibetan monks. I grasp the walnut handle and place the leather hood against my face, staring out through those two panes of glass at what the wheel has delivered. Some impossible gift fallen here from anywhere and anytime. Some extraordinary demonstration that might even impress a sideshow voyeur...

  —Flickering sodium-arc light, and heat haze, and the ceaseless clang of metal, an industrial cathedral of rust and verdigris and the innumerable corrosions all machines must in time endure. A cellar or furnace room, perhaps, hidden far below that soaring vault of girders and crumbling cement, pitched trusses and ancient bars of blister steel. Simply the Pit, as it is known to the damned and cast-off who have found their way down from the slag-littered hallways and parlors of ferrous superalloys far overhead.

  And here, these two slowly untangle themselves from the rubble. These two, who must once have served some specific, special purpose, who must certainly have fulfilled the designs of a fickle Machine-Age god. But even they no longer know what that function might have been. Too much time and the dust that filters down to clog intake valves and gearboxes, the inevitable toll of oxidation, the casualties of out-gassing and simple wear and tear. A century ago, a millennium, an aeon, they might have walked together on rolling streets of chrome beneath a sky the startling blue of sapphires. Naive and programmed beings, they might hardly have guessed then at the existence of this underworld, the realm of the obsolete, maybe only a fairy tale from long ages before when the frailty of bone and sinew had not yet given way to the forge and the die, to exoskeletons of celestrium and cold algorithmic minds.

  But for all that has been forgotten, these two still recollect the ghost of pleasure, the phantoms of automaton yearnings and needs. They have made dark deals with lesser simulacra, with nanite and nubot demons, and have spent time beyond reckoning on their own restorations. Parts that may as well be spare—as they will never work again—cut loose and traded for a few drops of hydraulic fluid, a milliliter of fluorocarbon lubricant, one perfect ball bearing. That long struggle only to reach this point, when one of them might raise a creaking tridactyl hand to caress the other’s dented and scorched silicon shell. Something flutters, whirs, and is still again...

  I hit the red switch and pull back from the stereoscope and these horrors, and the wheel does what all good wheels do.

  It turns.

  The Barker sighs, clears his throat, and begins to wind up his spiel. By now, there must be a fresh line of gillies waiting outside, and this bunch has surely gotten its dollar’s worth by now. He didn’t take them to raise, after all, and there are other freaks, other pitches, other shows waiting for easy marks. In the end, he says (so everyone will know it’s almost time to leave), this is a sad and tragic tale—an object lesson, if you will—and we can only learn from this poor devil’s predicament. A bird in the hand, Ladies and Gentlemen, is far better than a whole flock still waiting in the bush. Count your blessings. Know your place. And if any among you ever do go looking for your heart’s desire dare not look any further than your own backyard. Settle for less, because the only thing waiting at the end of the rainbow is more of the same. In a word, my good people, moderation. Thank you for your time, he says. Be sure to catch Spidora the Human Arachnid and Mr. Bones the Walking Skeleton. Please exit to the rear. No shoving...

  And I sit here on my stool, a breathless scrap of meat snared forever in the bowels of the contraption.

  And one grain of sand falls a thousand feet and lands upon the crest of the King of Dunes.

  Click.

  And I set my right eye to the Carib pirate’s telescope, or set both eyes to a pair of Galilean binoculars manufactured late in the 17th Century or lean into the heavy-duty, pedestal-mounted LittonEOS 20×120 rig the carnival picked up cheap somewhere from military surplus. All my indispens
able, useless surrogate eyes. All my ocular augmentations, so I’ll not ever raise a thing. I gaze into the eyepiece.

  No one holds me here. Not the Barker and not the carnival bosses. You would find no locks, no chains, no manacles to keep me captive. Only this spinning carousel and the incessant visions it bestows, and only the infinity of depravities and pain and longing that I’ve yet to behold.

  I sit up a little straighter and flip the green switch.

  And I see...

  Metamorphosis B

  My mother, she collected shells,” you say, hiding your left nipple beneath the shield of a cup-and-saucer limpet. “She had shells from at least a thousand different beaches, from all over the world.” And the limpet stays where you put it, a dab of spirit gum on the underside of the shell to hold it in place. “But my father, he was never content to merely collect anything. My father, that old conjure eel...” but you trail off, and now I can only hear the wind and the wet crash of the sea against the rocky shore and a few hungry gulls wheeling high and far away. You sit naked on sand as white as sugar, and your shells are spread out in a bright scatter all around. You and I sitting together and always apart, inside the wide pentacle you drew in the sand with a piece of driftwood. The two of us, and your shells, and the bottle of spirit gum, a wicker basket of fresh seaweed, an antique looking glass and a camel’s hair paint brush and the terrible old book bound in leather the colour of a scab. Prick at that cover, and you’ll reopen some awful Noachian wound in the world. Pick that scab, and the brittle pages would turn, and time itself might bleed.

  You sigh and select another shell, pausing to tell me it’s a deep-sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, and then you glue it to your right breast just above the limpet. “He was a fisherman of sorts, my father, a trawler, and one day he took her in his nets. She almost died, because she couldn’t breathe the air, of course. But then he kissed her.”

  I suspect that I would do well to follow the example of Odysseus’ men and plug my ears with wax. And I almost say so. Almost. But the sight of you sitting there cross-legged on the sand is enough to make me never want to speak aloud again. Once, when I asked your name, you said Parthenope. But only an hour later you said, no, it isn’t Parthenope, it’s only Ligeia, that your mother, she was called Parthenope by her father below the sea, before she was snared in a trawler’s net and forced to live as a human woman on dry land.

  “She begged him to give her back her gills and release her, but he was a wicked, greedy man, my father, and so he locked her up inside the forecastle and sailed for home.” And then you search among an assortment of snails until you find exactly what you’re looking for. You hold it out for me to see, and your skin seems unnaturally iridescent in the sun. “That’s a dogwinkle,” you tell me. “My mother found it at Folly Cove on Cape Ann when I was five years old.” The tiny snail is the same shade of orangish red as a poppy “This one ate nothing but mussels. You can tell from its colour. The dogwinkles that eat only barnacles are as pale as cream.”

  “He never set your mother free?” I ask, glancing anxiously at the evil leather-bound book with its scabby cover, wishing you’d left it beneath your bed today. Many nights, I’ve thought about taking it when you were asleep and burning it, or burying it in the dunes, or wrapping it in chains and sinking it in the bay. But cowards may entertain a million bold thoughts and never act upon a single one of them. I wait for you to answer me and watch while you use the dogwinkle to fill in a gap between the deep-sea scallop and the limpet hiding your nipple.

  “He knew a spell,” you reply, admiring your reflection in the mirror. “He knew a lot of spells. He could curdle milk and draw down lightning bolts from a clear sky. He could even make the sea’s daughter forget how to swim. He put a glamour on her so no one might ever suspect what she really was. No, he never set her free. That’s why she killed him.”

  Satisfied with the fit of the dogwinkle, you turn to the book, opening it, and I look quickly away. I’ve seen its pages enough times now. I do not need to see them ever again. I close my eyes and listen to the screeching gulls. And I remember a dream where the sky was filled with gulls, so many squawking, feathered bodies that they might have been the clouds of an approaching summer storm. I was in your ramshackle house beside the sea, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I called your names—all the names you’ve ever told me might be yours—but there was no answer except the noise of the raucous gulls, their wings battering the sky above the roof. I passed your bed, and there was your father’s grimoire, lying open on your pillow. The blankets and sleets were drenched with brine and dripping onto the floor. And what I saw in the book—what I dreamed I saw—these are not memories I want to keep, but they persist. I saw the words that bound a siren, the incantations that held your mother. I saw endless plains of black silt and marine snow and the bioluminescent ruins of sunken Atlantean towers. I saw jellyfish swarms and the slick ebony flesh and needle jaws of creatures that can survive the crushing water pressure a hundred fathoms down. Gulper eels and monstrous squid and the sinuous bodies of giant frill sharks and Greenland sharks, leviathan nightmares slipping silently along the walls of lightless abyssal canyons, all the demons and phantoms that haunt the perpetual gloom of the oceans’ aphotic zones.

  And turning away from that hateful book, I saw more water pooled on the floor, water that was also your footprints, and I followed them away from the bed and the open book. In the hallway, I paused before your tall curio cabinet, because the glass was cracked and smudged with mud. There was something watching me from one of the cluttered shelves, something peering balefully out at me from behind a large fossil ammonite, and its stalked eyes were not quite the same color as your own, that blue green of water that is just getting deep. It frightened me almost as much as the book on your bed, and so I didn’t open the case to shoo it away, though I worried it might break something precious.

  I hear you close the book and am relieved that I no longer need to avert my coward’s eyes.

  “One day, I asked her if she loved me,” you say, chewing thoughtfully at your lower lip and trying to decide between the carapace of a speckled crab and the larger shell of a blue crab. “I was almost nine years old, I think. We were down at Scarborough Beach that day, because she wanted me to see the ruins of a nightclub that had burned sometime back in the forties. I asked, ‘Do you love me, Mother?’, because I never had asked, and she’d never said, one way or the other.”

  Dreaming, I followed your tracks back through the little house, and after a while they weren’t water anymore. Instead, they were something sticky that glistened like the trails slugs leave on pumpkins and front-porch steps. They were no longer even footprints, really, just a long smear of slime leading at last to the bathroom door. It was closed, and when I tried the knob, I found it locked against me.

  “What did she say?” I ask, even though I already know the answer, because you’ve told me this story before. Still, it would be rude of me not to ask.

  You choose the blue crab and begin coating the edges of the carapace’s underside with spirit gum. “She looked out at the sound, and I could tell the question had made her very sad. I wished I hadn’t asked it, that I could stop everything and take it back. She said, ‘I always have tried to love you. But part of you is him, daughter, and you only came to me because he stole me from the sea and raped me. Do you understand?’ I said I did.”

  “That was a cruel thing to tell to a little girl.”

  “It was only the truth,” you say, returning the camel’s hair brush to the bottle of spirit gum. “I’ll take cruel truth over kindly lies any day of the week.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yes, I think so,” you reply, then carefully center the crab’s shell on your chest, between and above your breasts, a bare patch at the top of your sternum where the fine ridges of your clavicles almost meet. Then you press it firmly against your skin and hold it there, waiting for the glue to set. “She was my mother, after all. And it cert
ainly was not her fault that my father had captured her in his nets and brought her back to land and forced her to be his wife.” And I would think this all a lie, or the fancies of a schizophrenic mind, were it not for the things the book has shown me, and the things you’ve shown me, and all those other things, which I’ve seen for myself. I am denied the easy mercy of dismissing out of hand that which would strike almost anyone else as insane or as lies made up by a lonely woman who will never believe that she does not need fairy tales to be interesting.

  “She slit his throat with a common razor clam,” you say and smile. I was there the day a dental student in Cambridge gave you those teeth, perfect ivory triangles of feldspathic porcelain, saw-tooth carinae so you’ll never have to go looking for a common razor clam should someone’s throat need cutting. “Then she fed him, piece by piece, to the sea. He had always been morbidly afraid of drowning, of his body being lost at sea. He feared—if he were not buried in consecrated ground—that his soul would be trapped out there, always,” and you point eastward, towards the blue Atlantic horizon.

  “But no one ever found her out?” I ask, and you laugh and select the tall, threaded spire of a wood-screw shell and paint one side with spirit gum. The shell is the colour of Baltic amber.

  “She’d learned from the book, and it showed her how to cover her tracks. No one ever suspected a thing. Everyone thought the old bastard washed overboard in a gale. So what if the body never turned up. You don’t need a corpse to plant a headstone somewhere. My grandfather had prepared a special place for him in the mansions of Poseidon, a vessel to contain his soul until the end of time. Occasionally, in my dreams, I’m down there, too, in the place where that vessel is kept. It’s guarded by... well, I cannot tell you what guards it... but there is a guard, so no one and nothing can ever set him free. And sometimes, in my dreams—”