I wait a moment, then place Marco's picture next to the coins. The bartender's skin sweats oil and sorrow. People determined to vanish come to Harry's Bar, and for the right price, the miserable waiters in their starched, white uniforms show them how.
"When?" I ask.
"Can't say." The bartender's voice is frog-hoarse.
I know he means can't, not won't. Everything can be bought and sold here: sugar-sweet cubes that melt on the tongue and bring oblivion; death; pleasure; escape; even answers. The man behind the bar taught Marco how to leave, but didn't ask questions — a good bartender to the last.
"Thanks." I down my drink in one shot.
The liquor unfolds in my mouth, sending a spike through my lungs. My eyes water. I walk back outside.
It's dark. The stars are right. But the stars have always been right.
Where would I go if I was Marco? A useless question. He’s running from a suffocating life of expectation. The future reached out blind tentacles, snaring my heart. Marco chose R'lyeh's ways; R'lyeh's ways chose me. But no matter how many times I offer up my memories to those ways, they refuse to take them from me.
Firelight. A horse whinnies. The scent of wet leather and dry hay. Lips trace mine, arching my throat, shivering across my belly. I gather sweat on the tip of my tongue, briny-sweet like the sea. The horse's whicker turns to a scream.
My scars tingle, hot and cold at the same time. Some things can't be outrun, taken, or let go.
Suddenly, I don't give a fuck about Marco. And I have all the time in the world.
I walk along the water's edge, where there used to be a restaurant. Once — after R'lyeh, but before now — the entire city burned. The canals turned to oil and fire swept from rooftop to rooftop, sparing nothing.
Centuries of human existence, wiped out in the blink of an eye. I was there. I will be there again.
Venice, as always, survived. It rose from the ashes, born anew in brick and stone and marble, in deference to the old ways. It was also resurrected in glass and steel, in deference to ways old-yet-new. Finally, it shambled back from the dead with walls that bled and seethed, flickered and writhed, in deference to the way things are now and always will be. Venice: an impossible city, impossible to kill.
I cross a glass bridge. The water creeps, sluggish, beneath it. Lights glimmer on its surface; things sleep in its depths. Venice floats, it sinks, it is drowning, and it is drowned. And it survives. So do I.
I've been to the underwater city where Venice used to be. I've kick-pulled through cathedrals lit by the unearthly, phosphorescent glow of things best left unseen. I've worshiped at unholy altars, caressed by tendrils of night, studded by unnatural stars. I've witnessed the twisted images of saints spider-walking up church walls, their mouths open in silent screams. I've kissed the greened marble lips of the Mary who wept tears that weren't blood. I've seen Venice in all its guises, peeked behind all its masks, witnessed all its states of decay. Venice survives, no matter how ugly its scars.
My feet guide me to a little restaurant off Calle Mandola. It's almost unchanged since the old days, except for the light, and the sick-green smell, and the taste of salt in the air. They still serve a killer martini, though. Inside, the sound hits me like a wall. My heart skitters.
Guilt persists, even when I've given up love.
The place is nearly empty, but Josie sings as if the restaurant is full. Her voice is heartbreak: smoke and burnt amber and chocolate so dark it draws blood. It suits the restaurant's mood, and mine. Waiters move listlessly between tables, bringing baskets of bread, plates of limp vegetables in oily sauce, pasta - everything but meat, which ran out long ago, and fish, which is forbidden.
I tried to bring Josie fresh meat once. She wouldn't touch it. The thought of anything that had been in-between made her shudder and gag.
I remember — as much as I want to forget — how I held Josie's hands. Her moss-green eyes glowed with fear. I asked her to trust me. We stepped in-between.
And just as soon, we were jerked back, as if R'lyeh's ways had spit us out. Josie pulled away from me, the brief touch of otherness enough to shatter her already fragile mind.
We were staying in a hotel next to the theatre on Calle Fenice, in a room with walls the color of blood. The shower had stopped working long ago, but the toilet still flushed and, against all reason, the sheets were clean. When I stepped out of the between, Josie lay curled on the floor, clinging to the Turkish carpet as if it were the only thing holding her to this world.
"It burns. Ara, it burns."
I crouched beside her and touched her, feeling the sharp ridges of her spine through clothing and skin.
"Make it stop." She rocked and whimpered.
I lifted her sweater, peeling it as though from a wound. Tattoos, inked long before R'lyeh rose, but woken now, writhed across Josie's flesh. Black ink against skin the color of fired clay, lashing, twisting, moving in ways nothing ever should.
"Make it stop. It hurts. Make it stop." Josie turned her face, just enough to show tears and stark terror.
"I'm sorry," I told her. "I don't know how."
There were so many places I wanted to show her. I wanted to take her deep — somewhere off the coast of Mexico, to another drowned world full of turquoise water and old bones. I wanted to hold her hand, even through thick rubber gloves, and gesture to her through the enforced silence of breathing tubes and masks, hoping she'd understand.
She shuddered at the mere mention, and I went alone. I let the stillness envelop me; I drifted. Vast things floated beside me; an eye the size of Luxemburg opened below me in the deep. I should have been terrified, but I felt only peace as it looked into me and through me.
I used to think there were some sins too terrible even for R'lyeh, some offerings the spaces between would always refuse. But in that moment, I understood: sin is a human concept. So I did what I did to remain human. I buried sin deep at my core. I could walk the ways between a hundred, thousand times, and it would never change the deepest, most fundamental part of me.
In the end, I never took Josie anywhere. For a while, I tried to hold her when nightmares shivered beneath her skin, when her tattoos writhed in their own dreams. My touch only made it worse.
The day I left, she sat on the bed, head bowed. A red-glass heart from Murano lay cupped in her palm, brilliant as blood. I touched it with one finger; the glass was warm from her skin.
"I don't know why I have this," she said.
Her eyes held hurt, raw as a wound. Whatever I'd taken from her, trying to guide her through the between, was something I could never replace. Some wounds never heal. I left. I didn't ask her to forgive me.
Here and now, a ruby spotlight pins Josie — an American girl, singing Southern standards in a drowned and drowning city halfway across the world. Her song cuts knife-deep. I can't help remembering the last time we lay, cooling in each others' sweat, windows open, listening to the crowds leaving the Teatro.
That was the last time salt tasted good.
Josie's voice is sandstone, rubbed against my skin. It is coffee, scalding hot and poured into my lap. In the ruby spotlight and the green light seeping from the edges of the world, she's beautiful.
I sip my martini, slid without asking across the bar by the loyal bartender, Lorence. His skin is damp, his eyes as pained as the poor boy who served me in Harry's Bar. No matter that it hurts him, he still labors to breathe with human lungs, shunning his gills.
The song ends, and Josie leaves the stage. She wears a flower in her braided hair. Once upon a time, I may have given her a flower the same shade - a real one, not a silk monstrosity with hot-glue dew-drops clinging to its petals.
Her eyes meet mine, their moss-green accentuated by the underwater light.
"Ara." Josie brushes her lips against my cheek, making sure to catch the corner of my mouth.
She smells of lily-of-the-valley, dusted heavy to hide the reek of fear. Someone very wealthy must have bought it for her. Sce
nts like that are hard to come by.
Guilt spreads patterns of frost across the surface of my heart, but it doesn't touch the core. Pain flickers in Josie's eyes. I've forgotten; she hasn't.
I tip my head towards Lorence; it's the least I can do. Josie orders something as blood-red as her dress, but with far more kick.
"What are you doing here?" Josie asks.
A tendril of ink slips from beneath the strap of her dress, a questing tongue tasting the air. She shivers. The ink-shadow stains her eyes for a moment, too, turning them the color of lightning-struck wood.
"I was lonely," I say. It may be the most honest thing I've ever said; I don't know.
"Oh?" Her eyes are green again, mocking.
She lifts the long, black braid lying over my shoulder, running it through trembling hands.
"I wish I could do something for you." The words fall, a numb rush over my lips.
Josie is the most breathtaking woman I've ever known. Why can't I feel anything for her? I know what she meant to me, what she means to me, but I don't feel it. Not anymore.
"There's nothing you can do." She drops my braid, a soft slap against my leather.
Josie finishes her drink and orders another, her mouth set in a hard line that reminds me of Madam Senator and the case I should be on.
"There's nothing I can do for you, either." Josie steps back, eyes as hard as the line of her mouth.
She's right. There's nothing I can do except buy her drinks. And isn't there a selfish hope that her inhibitions will drop and we'll end up back in that decaying hotel room, listening to the remnants of humanity leave the Teatro while we fuck?
* * * *
Josie's next words send my pulse into the roof of my mouth. "Do you remember what you told me about your stepbrother and the night you got your scars?"
"No." The word emerges hoarse. I can't remember if it's a lie.
What did I tell her? What if I took her between, trying to make her forget?
Josie leans forward, her lips against my ear, her breath raising tiny hairs on my skin. Her voice is smoke and rough whiskey. "He called you his angel. They're shaped like wings, your scars."
When she draws back, I feel the absence of her breath.
"I don't think you're even human, anymore." Her hips sway as she walks back to the stage.
God help me, I'm wet and trembling. I want to throw her over the bar and nip the soft flesh of her thighs till she bleeds. Maybe she's right about me. Maybe I'm not human. Maybe I'm too much so.
Josie grips the microphone like she wants to throttle it. Her voice is steel wool; her eyes are fixed on me.
The blood-and-seawater light fills my mouth with salt. The world rolls, drowned in memory. Firelight flickers.
"The world is going to end." A voice speaks against my ear.
"It's already ending." I smell wet leather, tangle my fingers through wheat-gold hair, and pull wine-stained lips against mine. Rain drums. Hay prickles bare skin. "So, fuck me,"
I bite down hard, yank fabric roughly over hips; a body pushes into mine. A cry of pleasure and pain, and after, the world burns.
Josie's voice wails. Her smile is blade-edged. Her tattoos slither across her shoulders, chasing the ghost of my fingertips across her skin. Josie tips her head back, throat working. The song becomes a scream, her body shuddering, eyes rolling white between agony and ecstasy.
The bar squirms in murky half-light. Tentacles unfold. They undulate across the walls, wrap my arms, lift my hair. I drift in the green deep and they caress my bones.
I stagger for the door, retch on fire-scored pavement. Chill air slaps my face; I shift without meaning to. The threads binding past to present catch me, hurl me forward in time. My bones nearly shatter.
I brace myself against a wall, trembling. Damp, heavy breezes push air through the narrow, winding streets. My skin cold-sweats with borrowed dew. Where am I? When?
I walk, boots hushing over time-worn stone. I sympathize with Marco. I wonder why I'm hunting him. The Senator's envelope presses against my chest. I want to get this case over with and pretend there's a place I can go to that will feel like home.
Blonde hair, the smell of leather in the rain. I survived; he didn't. Fire scored my back with a thousand whips, tracing the shape of wings.
I walk along the waterfront, fighting memories that insist on surfacing, no matter how many times I try to give them away. I've begged the dark spaces teeming with star-ripe tentacles to take them, but they never do. There are no refunds on the price of survival.
I pass a nightclub. Tentacles — half-seen — lash the night. Shadows obscure the stars and they are just right. The club’s beat is a heart-sound, a pulse-thump. The building sways. It shivers. Pigeons weep and mourn in cages embedded in walls of slick, trembling flesh. Overhead, gulls still scream their laughter, but then they would, wouldn't they?
I know where I'm going now. Farther down the wharf is the man I need to see.
Vincenzo sits at the end of a pier jutting out into the water. The piles are ghosts against the lapping dark. Each weed-slicked piece of wood is topped with a creature with too many arms, suckers gripping rotten wood. They sing.
The eerie-sweet sound licks my spine, too much like the timbre of Josie's voice. But instead of smoky-hot, the tentacles sing cold. How can things without mouths sing?
Their voices — if they can be called that — are vast, and reminiscent of cavern-glow and waving fronds. Their tears, should they ever cry, would taste of copper, iron, sulfur, and flame.
Vincenzo’s arm moves, his brush stroke jerky, involuntary.
"Ara." He doesn't turn.
The scant, pulsing light behind me illuminates the rotting pier. It shows Vincenzo's face and the gaping spaces where his eyes used to be.
I was the one who found him on bathroom tiles slick with blood. Vincenzo's head rested against the edge of a claw-footed tub. He wept.
Rather — his body shook with sobs and his eyes lay next to the drain in the otherwise-spotless tub, darker than the most cerulean sea and incapable of tears. Blood had spattered where they'd fallen, but otherwise, the porcelain remained white, white, white. His palms were stained rust-dark; so were his clothes. I nearly slipped in the blood covering the floor, but in the vast, arctic space of the tub, there were only a few drops, trailing from the drain back to the eyes.
"I can still see." Vincenzo's sobs turned to laughter while I held him.
"Hello, Vincenzo." I can't tell if he flinches or not when I lay my hand on his shoulder.
"You smell like her," he says. Did I tell him about Josie? I can’t remember.
"I need information." My soles should be hard after years of running; my soul should be hard after years of leaving myself behind. Some things R'lyeh will never cure. Not in any place — not in any time.
"Watch the painting." Vincenzo's voice holds the same quavering tone as Josie's song.
Pain flickers through the space where his eyes should be, stars shifting through black, bloody caverns. I see blue, crimson-tinged spheres against porcelain-white; I feel him shaking in my arms. It's too late for apologies.
Vincenzo places a fresh canvas on the easel. His arm jerks, spastic. I watch over his shoulder as he paints. Flames. Venice burns.
"Thank you," I say.
Vincenzo's body hitches; he might be bleeding the paint, crimson, saffron, umber. He doesn't stop. I leave him to his colors and his pain.
I shift. Sideways, cross-wise, moving through a cold space as crushing as the deepest parts of the sea. My lungs compress. Tendrils wrap me. They lap my heart, sucker-hold it; they caress every part of my spine. They take a bitter-sweet song sung in a smoky voice like burnt almonds. I shiver as it fades; salt lingers on my tongue. It leaks from my eyes and I don't bother to brush it away.
Venice burns.
Heat batters me. I throw an arm up to shield my face. Inhuman tongues hiss unknown words, shiver laughter, babbling inside the flames. The stars spin. The can
al heaves. Angles and rounded nubs of stone-not-stone — worn by untold eons — rise, dripping. The city would shudder in revulsion if it could; instead, it screams as it burns.
Against all reason, I turn toward the city's fire-wrapped heart. Sweat pools beneath my leather. My scars itch, pulling tight.
Marco is here. I was wrong. He wasn't seeking the end of the world, just the end of his world.
I find him in the little restaurant off Calle Mandola - Josie's restaurant. The walls are black, curling with smoke-wrought shadows. They don't shift and unfold yet, but they will. Everyone else has either fled or burnt to death. Only Marco remains, belly-up to the bar.
He turns a pock-marked face towards me, unsurprised. Flame makes his already-dark skin ruddy. His eyes shine, and not only with the glow of alcohol. He mimes a toast, lifting his glass, and throws the liquor back, grimacing.
"I knew my mother would send someone."
I don't bother to answer. How long until the flames reach us? I pour myself a drink, and refill Marco's glass. Nothing unfolds against my tongue as I drink. My eyes don't water. It's only alcohol.
"She wants you to come home." I pour again.
Marco slugs the drink in his glass. His eyes shine empty, staring into a middle distance only he can see. When he ran, how far did he go? Has he seen the end of all things? Did he watch his mother die screaming? His eyes are unsettling.
"What are you running from?" he asks.
My stomach lurches. I try to pour another shot, but most of it spills on the bar. All this alcohol - we're a Molotov cocktail, waiting to happen. "What do you mean?"
"You wouldn't have chased me this far if you weren't running from something." Marco's eyes fix me.
I shudder. The sensation goes all through me. I don't taste what's in my glass; I taste cheap wine stolen from a funeral table the day we buried our parents — my father, his mother.
My stepbrother.
I saved his life once, pulled him out of the river. He was nine; I was ten. Lying on his back, rocks darkening with the water running from his skin, squinting into the sun, he called me his guardian angel.
Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods Page 21