Nikki and I finished our dances at the same time. I didn’t anything wrong with her, then, standing naked outside the booths. She was flushed, but she’d been working hard for almost thirty straight minutes. She was sweaty, too, which was odd. The club was air-conditioned, in order to keep the dancers’ sweat to a minimum. I wondered if the driver was going to ask for his turn, next. He didn’t. He passed Nikki the biggest roll of bills I had and have ever seen, collected his giant cargo, and exited The Cusp without another word. Nikki gathered her scarves from inside the booth and retreated to the dressing room.
She didn’t stay there long. She dropped the scarves on the floor, stuffed the roll of money into her purse, and returned to the club. The first customer she approached was a middle-aged guy wearing gray slacks and a white button-down shirt. He was sitting back from the stage, so he could watch the show and not have to pay out too much cash. Nikki straddled him in his chair and ground her pelvis against him. Whatever prudence he’d imagined he possessed flew out the window. He trailed behind her to the lap dance booths.
A minute later, he was screaming. The booth’s door flew open, and Nikki stumbled out of it. There was blood all over her legs, her ass. She stopped, found her balance, and walked toward the dressing room. As she did, her customer emerged, still screaming. The front of his slacks was dark with blood. Of course I assumed he’d done something to her. His face, though. He was wide-eyed, horrified. One of the bouncers was already next to him. I went to check on Nikki.
She was bent over one of the makeup tables, attempting to roll a joint. The backs of her legs, the cheeks of her ass, were scarlet. Closer to her, I saw that her skin had been scraped raw. It reminded me of when I’d been a kid and wiped out on my bike, dragging my palms or shins across the blacktop. The air smelled coppery. Blood ran down Nikki’s legs and pooled on the floor. Blood flecked the bottoms of the plastic wings, the tattoo. She wasn’t having any luck with the joint. Her hands wouldn’t do what she wanted them to. I pushed in beside her, and rolled the spliff as best I could. I passed it to her with fingers that weren’t trembling too much, then held her lighter for her.
I didn’t know what to say. Everything that came to mind sounded inane, ridiculous. Are you hurt? Her legs and ass looked like hamburger. Do you need a doctor? Obviously. What happened to you? Something bad. Who were those guys? See the answer to the previous question. I couldn’t look away from the ruin of her flesh. When I’d started working at The Cusp, I’d thought that I was entering the world as it really was, a place of lust and money. Now I saw that there was a world underneath that one, a realm of blood and pain. For all I knew, there was somewhere below that, a space whose principles I didn’t want to imagine. I mumbled something about taking her to a doctor. Nikki ignored me.
By the time one of the bouncers and the bartender came to check on her, Nikki had located her long gown and tugged it on. She checked her pocketbook to be sure the roll of cash was there, took it in the hand that wasn’t holding the joint, and crossed to the fire exit at the opposite end of the dressing room. Without breaking stride, she shoved it open, triggering the fire alarm. She turned left towards the parking lot as the door clunked shut behind her.
The bouncer, the bartender, and I traded looks that asked which of us was going to pursue her. I did. I hurried along the outside of the club and across the parking lot to where Nikki parked her Accord. The car was gone. I ran back towards the building, which everyone was pouring out of. I could hear a distant siren. Most of the customers were scrambling for their cars, hoping to escape the parking lot before the fire engines arrived and boxed them in. I considered making a dash inside for my keys, and was brought up short by the realization that I didn’t know where Nikki lived. I had an approximate idea—the apartments down by the Svartkill—but nothing more. I could drive around the parking lots, but what if she’d gone to the emergency room, or one of the walk-in care facilities? I didn’t even have her cell number, another fact which suddenly struck me as bizarre. Why couldn’t I get in touch with her? Why didn’t I know her address? The strangest sensation swept over me there in the parking lot, as if Nikki, and everything connected to her, had been unreal. That couldn’t have been the case, though, could it? Or how would I have found out about the job at The Cusp?
I didn’t see Nikki for the rest of the time I worked at the club. I stayed through the end of the fall semester, when I graduated early and moved, first back in with my dad, then down to Florida. The five enormous guys, their jaundiced driver, didn’t return during those months. The customer whose pants had been soaked with Nikki’s blood did. Less than a week later, he appeared at the front door, insisting he had to talk to her. His face was red, sweaty, his eyes glazed. He looked as if he had the flu. The bouncer at the door told him that the girl he was looking for no longer danced here, and no, he didn’t know where she’d gone. The guy became agitated, said he had to see her, it was important she know about the cards, the hearts. The bouncer placed his hands gently but firmly on the guy’s chest and told him the girl wasn’t here and he needed to leave. The guy broke the bouncer’s nose, his right cheek, and three of his ribs. It took the other two bouncers on duty to subdue him, and they barely managed to do that. The cop who answered the bartender’s 911 call took one look at the guy and requested backup. The cop said they would transport the guy across the Hudson, to Penrose Hospital, where there was a secure psych ward. As far as I know, that’s what happened. I don’t know what became of Nikki’s last customer, only that I didn’t see him again.
Years went by. I left Florida for Wyoming, big sky and a job managing a bank. I bought a house, a nice car. The district manager was pleased with my performance, and recommended me for a corporate event in Idaho. I took 80 west to Utah, where I picked up 84 and headed north and west into Idaho. Somewhere on the other side of Rock Springs, a white van roared up behind me and barely avoided crashing into the back of my rental. I swore, steered right. The van swung wide to the left, so sharply it rose up on its right wheels. I thought it was going to tip over, roll onto the median. It didn’t. It swerved towards me. I should have braked. Instead, I stomped the gas. The rental surged past the van. As it did, I glanced at the vehicle’s passengers. Its rear and middle seats were filled by a group of enormous men whose crewcut heads did not turn from the road ahead. In the front seat, a driver with black hair and yellowed skin laughed uproariously along with a woman with long brown hair. Nikki. Together, she and the driver laughed and laughed, as if caught by an emotion too powerful to resist. He wiped tears from his eyes. She pounded on the dashboard.
I pulled onto the shoulder and threw the car into park. My pulse was hammering in my throat. I watched the van speed west down the highway until it was out of sight. I waited another half hour before I shifted into drive and resumed my journey. The remainder of the drive to Idaho, and all of the way home, I didn’t see the van. But I was watching for it.
I still am.
For Fiona
The Vault of Heaven
Helen Marshall
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine…
—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
‘The Hymn of Apollo’
It will be of little surprise to those who know me well that, as a boy, I was possessed by frequent night terrors. I do not like to speak of them now. It embarrasses me—even as it embarrassed my father once. I was a child: I saw as a child and I spoke as a child but my fears were not those of a child. There was a small window set into the north wall of my bedroom, and from this I would gaze out upon the constellations of lights that burst through the gloom: stories my father told me of heroes and monsters, there a dragon, there Hercules. To him these were figments, glimmering signs of a bygone age, but to me? I saw something more…a shape, a glimpse of something, an…extrapolation—a polished skull, grotesque and leering, a living death mask; it set a hook in my soul and with it, utter panic.
My friends have remarked
upon the nervous disposition that has followed me into adulthood, but I do not comment. You may from this conclude that I am a private person. This is not entirely true; my discipline requires collaboration; I have adapted out of necessity—and the company of some I value very highly, indeed, if it can be got easily enough, and without those promises of further commitment so often pressed upon bachelors of my stature. But one thing my years at Cambridge taught me—pleasant though they were in most respects—was that those of an academic mind are quick to judge; and, having judged, quicker still to slaughter. It is a hobby of theirs—and mine too, if I am honest, or it was once—so.
It was that greatest of Stagirians, Aristotle, who popularized the notion of the five senses—or the five wits—which may strike one as odd since the Greeks had as many forms of divination—and what is that but another form of seeing?—as they had kinds of love. Why five then? It has always been clear that my nervous disposition is the result of some form of sensitivity if you follow me. In fact, it has been one of my greatest assets: the ability to behold in my mind the shape of a thing as it was once, its true form, to sense—ha ha—its outlines.
I say this all as prelude, a ward against skepticism. In my school days a certain atheistic pragmatism was the fashion in these sorts of matters. A necessary inoculation, perhaps. I once visited an excavation of the bema at Korinthos. The site had hosted the tomb of an old man of little account, which had been looted for a few trinkets in the ancient city’s heyday. The locals were so gripped by the fear of the ghost—and this one was no king masked in gold, no gloried warrior!—that they rededicated the place as a temple to appease him.
I understand skepticism. Ghosts, glamours and curses for those who disturbed the dead: these were what my colleagues and I risked. In the golden hills of Hellas, excavation was a bare step up from grave robbing.
#
In the summer of ’57, my pals had all landed plum positions in Ankara or Amphipolis but several disastrous months at a site in the Peloponnese—this was little more than a set of caves discovered by a goatherd, to be clear—had taught me I had neither the complexion nor the stamina for excavation proper: in proper sunlight I curl up and wither like a slug. I could not embark upon a new career path. My father had made that perfectly clear, and docked my subsistence payout from the trust after a pretty heinous fight. My debts were starting to pile up. One of the symptoms of a nervous disposition is a tendency to drink; one of the symptoms of a Cambridge education is the tendency to drink to excess
After Trinity College, the archaeological museum at Semos was an undeniable let-down—barely preferable to starvation. Semos was a harbour town in one of those rather forgettable islands that had once boasted some obscure trade—sponge-fishing in this case—that had stocked coffers in the early days before modern industry had changed the game. More recently, the town, with its idyllic views and glass-green waters, had been co-opted as a playground for the Athenian rich. They had funded—haphazardly if not without enthusiasm—a number of cultural projects offering the usual diversions.
The museum boasted an assortment of cracked pithoi jars behind glass, nothing in the way of English signage, and a stinking-hot pair of shared offices at the back. Its bureaucracy was riddled by the usual plagues: questionable politics, intermittent corruption, and general ineptitude. The director had pieced together funding for the reconstruction of some hammered bronze fragments, and over-promised regarding the delivery date. The previous postholder had dropped out—a national I did not know, no publication history to speak of—and the clock was ticking. They didn’t want an Englishman, not really, and I didn’t want them: but I had—foolishly, I admit—jilted the college secretary, and so many of my applications to better positions had mysteriously gone astray. It was only a call from Cavanaugh that landed me the post in the first place, nepotism and blind luck being the two best friends an academic has.
The head of the administration, it turned out, went by the name Nikolaos Papadiliou, not the unctuous civil servant I had expected, but an impressive figure: tough and brawny, born of a generation of sponge-divers, no doubt. He laughed in short, measured bursts, and I found myself wondering how long he could hold his breath.
“Hey ho and welcome,” he cried with a meaty handclap. His English was flawlessly, pointedly posh. I’m a Cambridge man too, it seemed to say, I was once a master in your land as you shall never be in mine.
“Hullo,” I said stiffly, removing my fingers from his grasp.
“Come in, come in, do. A pleasure to have you here, and at such short notice. Found a place to dig in?”
For eighty a month I had secured a dilapidated two-story, all cracked red tiles and formerly white stucco, along with an ancient peasant woman who devised an endless string of poetic epithets for the broom, the basin, and the bed.
“I do hope to get properly acquainted.” His eyes were sharp with mockery. “One such as you, good pedigree, Cavanaugh told me, but a hard worker nonetheless. Not likely to disappoint, are you, not if you’re one of Cavanaugh’s bunch?”
“No, sir,” I replied, “I know what I’m doing.”
“Marvelous!” he said. “You shall understand the nature of our dilemma soon enough. And you shall solve it, ha! Cavanaugh’s prodigy. We shall see about that, won’t we?”
To the others he barked like a sea captain, but for me it was the familiar mix of silk and sulk of the Senior Common Room.
The staff stared at me, uncertain of what spell I had placed upon their commander.
The chill of isolation set in.
#
But the work, at least, was what I had expected.
I hadn’t caught the entire gist of the assignment from Cavanaugh—he had been pretty tight-lipped before my departure, and I wonder now if he hadn’t been knocking on with some of the same girls I had been after—but it didn’t seem as bad as I’d feared. I found at my desk a series of half-completed sketches of bronze fragments, most annotated heavily in a ragged hand that took some deciphering. My distinguished predecessor’s notes.
The find had been fairly recent. The rains last winter had eroded the soil, and a massive hole had opened up in the local necropolis. The villagers had known about the site for ages—their own cemetery was located next to it—but none bothered themselves until the collapse led to the discovery of a simple shaft grave. But while the archaeologists were preparing to enter, looters snuck in under the cover of darkness and took what they could lay hands on. When it became clear the hoard wasn’t gold, as they had anticipated, but rather hammered sheets of bronze, they fled. They thought the prize worthless. A disappointment. It was only in the morning when the archaeologists finally came to see for themselves that they discovered in the earth the remnants of what they believed to be a huge disc—perhaps a cauldron, perhaps the covering of a shield—glinting in hues of sea-green and gold.
Bronze work of that sort was my speciality, and I’d seen plenty of the like before. Griffins and bare-breasted sirens. Birds and oxen. Show me the slit of a hemline, and I can tell you if the figure was man, woman or child, social class, hand position even, on a good day. All in all, this kind of craftsmanship was shockingly predictable. The Greeks had a very definite sense of beauty: repetition, symmetry, proportion—what Plotinus called ‘formedness’. They valued it above all else, for to them it represented a link with the godhead: the perfection of form was the perfection of the universe itself. Time distorted but the figures themselves, in the purest sense, conformed.
My sensitivity was an often an asset in reconstructions of this sort. If I held a fragment before my eyes, my mind would travel the channels, imagining, filling in gaps, unspooling the thread of time to apprehend the thing as it had been once. And so I sat with the pieces—like ancient tesserae, elusive, perplexing—before me. They appeared to be from the Archaic period, bore some resemblances to the finds in Phidias’ workshop in Olympia, which meant they’d either traveled a surprising long way, or else someone had picked up his sty
le. But there were Oriental influences too, more than I would have expected: lotuses, anthemia and tendrils, the hindquarters of a…lion, the head of a woman, a sphinx? The notes were confused. Or merely confusing. There were wild leaps I had difficulty following: a line my predecessor curled when I expected it to straighten, figures conjectured that seemed wildly implausible.
It is difficult to convey the sense of this experience, except that it was disorientating, and yet there was a sense of maddening logic. I felt a faint thrill running through me, though of wonder or terror I cannot say, only that it reminded me of the dreams I had as a child, those shapeless, chaotic images that left me drenched with sweat, wild-eyed. My predecessor’s imaginings were nonsense. Of course, they were nonsense. But they were that peculiar breed of nonsense that left an imprint upon the world, gave it depth: the barest glimpse of a whole, inarticulate, dimensionless, without form or substance—but with force—something—a prickle of sweat, a widened eye, a tightening in the stomach…
My immediate judgment was that he had either been a genius—or an utter crank.
No wonder they had sacked him.
#
Most of the staff wouldn’t speak to me. They were polite enough, to be sure, but I felt inscribed within a circle whose borders I could not detect and I could not pierce. I tried on several occasions but the results were embarrassing. Nikolaos Papadiliou spoke to me from time to time, but I detected within his false bonhomie—“How are you getting on, old chap?”—an edge of contempt.
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