by Amber Sparks
I’ll save you, said Inge. I’ll find a way. We’ll get away from here, go to Kenya. We’ll film a lion pride, live in a house by the lake there. I’ll build it for you with my own two hands. Your Faerie Queen will never find you, and she kissed him, threw her ridiculous little arms around him, and he found himself kissing her back and he didn’t know why but he kept on kissing her—Praise the lord—and she tasted like strawberries and yes, honey, manna from heaven—Praise the lord, praise the lord of heaven above—and Lana would set fire to his bed if she knew—Praise and glory to the highest—and he wondered, wildly, if maybe she actually could save him, impossible Inge. He wanted so much to let her try.
Dearest Unbending Hannah,
There are no anchor points here in Hollywood. I do not understand why we try to describe this fixed place, this telescoped speck in the universe—why we try to drape this world in words, as if that could hold or encompass it. I suppose we must try because how else to say what we long for? And that is perhaps what is hardest of all: to be full of such longing—for stone, for onions, for soap, for dawn, for familiar skies, for the dreams of others. Don’t you yearn, most desperately, to know if other people’s dreams resemble yours? I dream sometimes of an ash, an oak, and a hawthorn, circling a bright green patch of overgrown grass. The green is brilliant, dazzling, like emeralds, yet no sun shines—the light comes from within. What does this mean? Is it something I saw in childhood? Is it some vision sent by the daoine sídhe? A secret mound of the faerie folk?
Do you have such dreams, Hannah, when you close your eyes, your children down for the night? Do you dream of the land, of that strange thing they say we Irish all share? Do you dream of something like home?
I remain, forever yours in blood, Ingeborg
Curiosity #145: Stuffed albino crocodile, origin unknown. Glass eyes. Some scales missing or damaged on underside and left rear leg.
The museum was short on money for its new African hall, and so they sold some of Set’s films to an eager young businessman who planned to set up his own picture business, specializing in what he called “animal adventure pictures.” Set had no idea until the eager young businessman called him, demanding more. I want a picture shot in Kenya, he said. Charging elephants, lions, crocodiles on the riverbank, all of that.
Tanganyika, thought Set. Paradise Lake. Where the great African explorers went looking for the source of the Nile.
He told the eager young businessman, yes. Yes.
Let’s make this picture about the lions, said Inge, between bites of corned beef.
You can’t go, said Set. You know that.
She frowned at him. You mean you don’t want me to go.
Well—
Is Lana going? She held her breath. He had never broken it off with Lana, in part because he didn’t see why he should. They were all having fun, weren’t they?
Alone in her rented bedroom, Inge sometimes cried to think of all the fun they were having. She thought of leaving again, hitching a ride on a packet boat to someplace exotic. But the thought made her head ache and her heart lurch about in her chest.
After all those unanswered letters, Set knew better than to write to Cedric again, but he wished his brother could come along. He wished he could ask Cedric what to do about Inge. Set thought about calling Pru, but he didn’t suppose he should bother her with his worries. Still, he was worried. Cedric had always included him in his adventures. And here he was keeping secrets from him. Set didn’t know what to make of it. In the end, he called Constance instead, who seemed thoroughly annoyed. Leave Cedric be, she told him. Attend to your own life, your own future.
But what about his lost city? said Set.
Look, I’m not trying to be unkind, said Constance, but I’m telling you, don’t make Cedric’s mistakes. Go forward. There’s no flying back to the far-gone past.
Set and Inge are dancing in Inge’s rented bedroom, lurching into bed and table and making lopsided, monstrous shadows on the walls. They stomp out a rough waltz to the three-four time of the landlady’s polka music playing below. Laughing, breathless, half-drunk, they careen around, Inge attempting to mimic Set’s easy grace. She finally stumbles, sinks to the ground in gasping mirth. He sits on the bed and shakes his head. Your landlady will be up any moment, he says, and then you’ll be in for it.
But you’re such a good dancer, Inge says. I’d never have believed it.
And you, says Set, pouring two more glasses of whisky, you are the lousiest dancer I’ve ever taken the floor with.
Inge snorts. It’s these huge feet, she says. They’re like great bloody bricks! What can I do with them but fall all about the place? She begins unlacing her boots. Set, slightly more sober, kneels to help her. She grabs his wrist. Don’t think, she tells him, that I’m undressing for you. She is solemn, holds his eyes; her hair is a bright halo over her round Madonna’s face. Then a smile splits it in two, ruins the effect. She purrs with laughter and flings herself onto him.
You’re part animal, he says, just after. You’re a wild creature. He leaves through the window, climbing down to the porch from the second floor. She watches him go. He waves merrily from the street and jumps in his car, no doubt off to meet Lana for a late dinner. She can tell it costs him nothing to leave, and she wonders if she is the stupidest person alive for giving herself away like this. Is he really a ghost, she wonders, or just a cad with a convenient excuse? But she has also watched him sleep, and she has seen the way his face goes blank and smooth, the way his eyes go so unfocused. It seems much too easy for him to slip out of life, Set. She worries that one day he’ll forget to slip back in.
Since the bear, Set has always been nervous around large animals on his expeditions. Even the ponies worry him. Their teeth are so big and they give off such an obvious odor; he isn’t used to anything that smells and makes no attempt to mask it. And everything smells here in the jungle. The heat creates aggression, even in the smells themselves. They attack, they twist round one and squeeze, insidious, like the vines and other creeping things.
Inge laughs when he tells her this. She has grown up around animals. Horses, dogs, sheep, pigs—their musty earthiness mingling with the smell of fat sizzling in the kitchen, with the heavy smell of the hanging damp in the walls, the sharp wet of the dung in the hay, the sweet heather on the heath and the dark smoke of wood on the fire.
Odor is geography, she says. And it’s the same in the city—but not natural smells, not such animal smells. More people, more soot, more smoke, more smells that get into the lungs and burn the eyes and the throat.
We never lived that way, says Set.
Of course you didn’t, she tells him. Your people are wealthy.
Set knows this is true. He feels it is unfair of Inge to be constantly pointing it out, when her people were wealthy once, too. Just because they squandered it didn’t mean she could cast it off like a dirty old coat. It followed her around the world, the sweet, decayed smell of the genteel poor. Like the dried flowers Pru put in clothing drawers.
But I’m not like that at all, says Inge. Why can’t I cast it off?
You just can’t, says Set. It clings to you. It makes you careless of the world.
She bristles, but she knows he’s right. She remembers when she was very small, and one of her father’s friends gave a magic lantern show for the children. This was a few years after her mother died, and her father seemed unlikely to ever pull himself out of his own sadness. And so his friends—back then he still had some—would bring entertainments for his children, puppets and picture books and candies and wooden toys. One particular friend possessed a magic lantern. He was an enormous old banker with a bushy red beard and a huge, booming voice. Inge had been quite afraid of him, until he transformed the walls of the nursery into the walls of the wide world instead. It was the first time Inge had seen such pictures of the sea. The hand-painted glass slides dramatized scenes from “The Wreck of the Hesperus”; there were brightly colored slides of dancing sailors singi
ng sea chanteys, and there was a dramatic battle between French and English ships, complete with cannon fire and burning masts, stark orange in relief against the brilliant blue water. Inge fell in love on the spot, and she knew that someday she would seek these vast oceans, and the places beyond them.
But she thinks now of the feeling of watching the unreal from the safety of one’s sleeping quarters. This, she feels sure, is how the world has continued to strike her, through her entire adult life so far. This is a life of watching, observation. Even her camera creates distance. All the more reason she sees to love Set—he may be a ghost, but she’s never been more alive, more invested in the world, than when she’s with him. She loves him like the sea, and like the sea she’d let him sweep her anywhere.
Set, for his part, wonders if he could be thawing: Is Inge warming him up, or just wearing him down? He is feeling, again, that inevitable pull toward Pru, toward Cedric, toward home. What would happen if he brought Inge with him? Would there be a kind of combustion? Would his soul come crashing back like the end of a spell? He knows he has, at least, to try.
Cedric finally broke his long silence and wrote to Set that fall, a shattering sort of letter. Great men have passions, he wrote. Smaller men are frightened of them. The ruthless seeking of the single-minded—it frightens these small, petty men. They stifle us, smother us, take away our funds. They tell us to branch out, divest. Take up new interests. They call us obsessed. But I’ll tell you something: the world needs obsession. No one can blaze a new path in the world without it. All the great explorers had it: Scott, Amundsen, Livingstone, Burton. I should have followed in their footsteps sooner.
But it’s not too late. This find—it’s nothing less than the City of the Dead itself. It will be the find of the century—King Tutankhamen will be nothing beside it. And you too should leave that terrible place, with its seductions and illusions and fleeting promises of fame, and follow me north to find Hades.
Set was unsure what to make of the letter. He was torn. He owed everything, his life, to Cedric, and yet he frightened Set, seemed too sure he owned his brother’s soul. But this was Cedric, Cedric—so—should he go? Should he undo the life he’d made in service to his only living brother? What could the past continue to cost?
Back when the War had begun, Inge’s German aunt wrote to her of rallies in the street, of crowds spontaneously breaking out into “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Inge was disturbed; she loved the works of German playwrights, novelists, and composers. Her aunt sent her Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, and she read it in a breathless few hours, enthralled. The Germans, far more than her father’s people, represented culture for her—they were urbane, artistic, modern. And they were her mother’s—they were something of her mother’s she could hold. Her aunt wrote her that some women in Berlin—including her!—worked in shops, as secretaries, as nurses—in all sorts of professions. The bust of an ancient Egyptian queen named Nefertiti was in display at the Berlin Museum, and Asta Nielsen’s films made waves; a woman with a temperament and hair, her aunt said, as wild as Inge’s. Even Albert was passionate over German motorcars. Even her father, British to the core, adored Wagner and Strauss.
But then Albert died, and her father tore up the letters as they arrived, pronounced her aunt, and all Germans, spies and murderers. And then the letters eventually stopped coming. And then her aunt disappeared, fled, perhaps, to Switzerland, perhaps to France. Inge missed her voice-on-paper dreadfully.
When her father died, she was not surprised. She and her sisters felt sure, after the War, that he could not last long. He was a man of another era, an Edwardian, looking for fixity, certainty, reliant on tradition. He did not understand the turbulence of this new world—he could not feel safe in such unsteady times. He was too old to find his footing again, especially in a country he didn’t belong to, in an Ireland busy uprooting itself, hurling itself forward by violent and unstoppable force.
The men came to their house in the middle of the night. Inge thought it odd they were smashing windows; they could have crawled in through the missing ones in the south wing, or simply walked right in through the door in the kitchen that wouldn’t lock. But once her father came to the front door, they were quieter, almost polite. Inge recognized some of them—village boys, one of whom delivered groceries to the house every Wednesday. He kept his hat pulled down, but Inge knew him just the same. And one of them was the cook’s boy, who refused to meet her eyes.
The brashest boy shoved Inge aside and demanded the keys from her father. Her father stared, blankly. She wanted to tell the men it was no use, he was already gone. But he finally moved. He went to his office and took up the big ring of keys. He held it out, heavy and jangling, like some foreign body he’d longed to be rid of. They were allowed to pack a small bag, some clothing and a toothbrush and some favorite books, and then they were turned out of doors to watch the fire creeping along, licking the floors, consuming the drapes and the rugs, cracking and tipping the beams until the whole structure collapsed on itself and exploded in a great yellow whoosh.
Inge had never seen anything burn before. She could feel the high heat of the fire from where she stood on the lawn. More villagers had come and were carting away the furniture that hadn’t burned up. A small man walked past them with her father’s favorite chair slung over his back and called them dirty papists, which she didn’t understand at all, because she saw him at the village church each Sunday. She hated the house and had often wished it burnt, or bombed, or otherwise destroyed. And now that it was she didn’t feel sorry, exactly, although she was sad, and that was complicated, too. She wished she could have saved the library. That was the hardest hurt of all.
Hannah and Clara were crying—loudly enough that Inge could hear them over the fire. She was almost embarrassed to see them so frightened. It seemed obscene to watch someone’s naked fear, and so instead she turned her eyes toward the fire, waited for the last flames to fall, and flicker, and go out.
And in the end, all her father could do was try to save his daughters, to throw them to the mercy of the waters and bow quietly out of the chaos, duty done. He left a note on the blackened floor, next to his last glass of whisky. A quote, from Yeats: “There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candle light.” It fluttered away during the shotgun blast, and a gust of wind through the burned parts of roof blew it up and out to sea.
Curiosity #1039: Illuminated manuscript, 180 x 125 mm, circa 1390, titled The Book of the Saints. Illuminated by The Master of Death—possibly Pierre Remiet.
Pru has welcomed them as warmly as she knows how. She has made the tea herself and served it in the green and garnet parlor, and Inge has had to stifle a laugh—drinking tea with this old-fashioned matron in a button-neck frock dating back probably to the gay nineties, while strains of fractured jazz spill out of the radio, the orchestra tuning up. Fragments of the past lined up in great cabinets along the wall. Set seems oblivious to the incongruity—though, Inge is quickly discovering, Set seems oblivious to almost anything his strange family does. He seems to think the strangeness is in himself instead. Inge is not sure how they have managed this, his family, but she thinks it is a mean trick.
And here the real strangeness stands now, in Cedric. He stands beside Pru, holds half of a beautiful ivory mask. He wears a necklace of bone. He carries a knife of flint. One of the cabinets is open, its contents spilled onto the parlor rug. Arrowheads and beads and bowstrings. On meeting Inge, he shakes his head sadly and quotes Dante, “These have no hope of death . . . mercy and justice disdain them.” So, she thinks, Set’s living brother is mad.
Set looks to Pru, shocked, and she shrugs. He’s been here for months, she says, but I didn’t want to tell you. How could I?
But what about the expedition? Point Hope? Set stares at Cedric, a dark sort of fear frothing up in his hollow place.
Look around you, boy, says Cedric. The city is everywhere—we are uncovering it now, always, forever digging it up. We are a
lways digging up the dead.
Oh, there is no city, sighs Pru. There never was. You should have known that. She fingers the buttons on her collar with an unsteady hand. And you should never have brought her into it, she says, and nods at Inge.
Cedric grins at Set, an empty chasm-yawn more grimace than pleasure. Oliver, he says, now he wanted to collect you, that’s why he didn’t mind what we’d made you. It was only I who suffered, only I who knew what you’d become. He sinks into a chair, seems to shrink into his own skin. You were Oliver’s curiosity, he says, but you were always my ghost.
Inge stares at Cedric. Stop telling him insane things, she says. If he’s empty inside it’s your fault, not his.
Don’t you think I don’t know that? asks Cedric. He takes off the mask, dashes it to the floor. I’ve lived every day with that guilt. You can’t come back, not truly. There’s always a price to be paid by someone. I’m paying for it now.
Set gently pushes Inge aside. Cedric watches them both, Set with a look on his face that he’s never seen before, something so open, so willing, that he finds it almost obscene. And the girl—wearing a worshipful gaze like a commedia mask, as frankly and sadly smitten as Pierrot. Something in Cedric springs up in rage, as if he were looking at an abomination he’d created—something so wrong with the fabric of the world that it has to be ripped out. His fault, after all. He couldn’t find a dead city; he couldn’t find a way back from death. Only one way to fix it now.