Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017

by Uncanny Magazine

  I looked down at the poet, whose face was hopeful, though the evidence of years of despair was written on it, a cloth pleated by pain.

  My spine convulsed where the stowaway wrapped about it, and I saw Poe glance at me, his face concerned, as Manchester aimed the camera at the tableau vivant he’d arranged.

  A dark cloud passed over the sun, and a raindrop splattered on the glass panes above me. The monster moved.

  Ten seconds. Twenty. My heart quivered in my breast and the stowaway stretched. Thunder outside, and the building rattled. Darker still.

  Thirty seconds, and something began to shift inside my skin. I began to feel night falling over my body, stars appearing on the tips of my fingers, coming into light all over my flesh, beneath my dress and up and down my arms, brilliant points of pain and fire, and myself an indigo woman curtained in silk and satin. I heard my own voice cry out as the stowaway began to emerge.

  “Stay still!” Manchester shouted. “Do not let it move you!”

  I resisted the urge to let my body fall down the stairs and upon him. Not only upon him, but upon the innocent Poe. Their blood and bones, their organs like bright ink on a page made of snow. I would write the story of Thule with their flesh, I would—

  Darkness slithered over my eyes, and I held them wide, trying to keep from doing what Night wanted me to do. I tasted metal where I’d bitten my tongue, and I heard myself hiss. A sound a dreamer might make whilst wandering a long passage, the way a scream might transform, in the voice of that sleeper, into a song. All these nights of invisibility, a wandering swath of stars falling upon the unlucky, all these nights, a woman made of nothingness.

  There was a crashing sound, and there, before me, was Poe, his face pale as the moon, his eyes no longer anguished, but purposeful.

  “TO ME,” he roared, and lurched up the staircase, his hands reaching for mine. He spun to face the camera as the shutter closed, his ungloved hand still clasping my own.

  I felt the stowaway leave my body and rush out, into the air, into the camera, away.

  The thunderclouds fled the sun, and the sky brightened. Night receded. I drew in a ragged breath.

  The daguerreotypist withdrew the plate from the camera and darted to the developing room, donning a set of India rubber gauntlets as he went, but I could only look at Poe. He would not meet my gaze. What had he done?

  Manchester emerged from the developing room.

  “View it,” he said, and gestured us into the room. “It is not as you imagined it would be, and yet.”

  A gleaming tray of mercury, held over a spirit lamp, and fumes that felt golden upon inhaling. The plate rested above the heated mercury, an image emerging in salt on its face, delicate as dust on a butterfly’s wing.

  I watched it, praying that I’d see what ought to be in the daguerreotype and not something else. Hoping to see my image containing the stowaway, and all of it trapped within this plate of glass.

  But as it emerged, I did not see the creature, nor did I see my own face. It was dark shadows appearing and then shifting through red and blue to black again, the eyes first and then the rest.

  I saw Edgar Allan Poe, and within him, all around him, Night. The image was of the poet, suspended in the darkness of the background, and I could see myself in ghostly silhouette behind him, my face covered in stars, my eyes glittering, my fingers laced in his own.

  The poet looked at me, and reached into his jacket. He removed a pot of ink, looked at me tenderly, and opened it. I watched him, uncertain, and then, suddenly, he flung it over me.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Darkness. A blotting out, a removal from view.

  The Thule Daguerreotype

  The original Poe portrait, taken in desolate circumstances in the year eighteen forty–eight, the year before the poet’s death, is, over the years, lost and found, discovered in the possession of a traveling hypnotist, fallen from a drawing room wall, set on fire. It lives in legend, copied and etched, discussed, tattooed, made the subject of academic texts.

  After the image was taken, the subject wandered the streets, visiting the home of a woman he had proposed to, and raving that he was doomed, that he was done for good. He screamed for his soul.

  The daguerreotype depicts a man in a half–buttoned black dinner jacket, a rumpled white shirt, an ascot tied and wrapped tightly enough to suggest that it is keeping his head from tumbling off. He has a high white forehead, a dark mustache, tousled hair, and eyes sunk deep in a face lined with grief. He is a year from dying, but in the Ultima Thule portrait, he appears to have emerged from his tomb, and indeed, the image depicts the poet four days after his failed suicide by laudanum.

  If one looks closely, with the proper knowledge, it is possible to see the figure behind him, a spectral form, a radiance draping over one of the man’s shoulders, an image of the missing, left in dust on a silver plate. Perhaps it is a woman, or perhaps it is something else entirely.

  The business of portraiture is one of silver and gold by the ton, and the miserable face of the poet is immortalized in precious metal. The presence behind him is a stain rendered in darkness, silver nitrate, an abyss that reflects light.

  This is a saint’s icon, Edgar Allan Poe’s image pressed like a kiss to a ground glass windowpane, and the form holding him is a glittering ghost, mutable as frost over a view of a city at night. Does it hold him as a lover or as a captive?

  What is left inside this portrait?

  That is one way to look at a photo of a ghost. Another way is to look at both figures, this portrait, this imaginary kingdom and its creator flickering in and out of the light, and see it as a record of more than one event, the moment when a poet’s soul was removed, the moment when a man counted down the seconds remaining in his life.

  He counts them in syllables. He counts them in sentences. He counts them in stories. All that we see or seem , he writes. Is but a dream, within a dream.

  Open the glass panes that house the portrait and blow, a single breath, and the image is only imagined again. Press a finger to the face of this ghost and watch him become thin air.

  The Lady’s Last Tale

  I felt myself disappearing, but I remained scored into the world, my skin a page with lines on it, my hair streaked with silver, my dress still as bright as it had been, but now obliterated.

  The photographer faded as I faded, and the studio as well, whether they had been there or no. An imaginary Providence or a true one, I could not say. The blue wallpaper was night, and I was part of it now, and the mercury bath was stars, and I was part of that as well.

  Thule was before me then, a white landscape of cliffs and women shrouded, a body—was it my body?—washing up on a coastline made of bones. I was the sea and I was a ship, and I was a city of ghosts.

  I did not disappear from the world, though it seemed I might. I stayed, and this kingdom by the sea stayed. I climbed the stairs in a tower, I in my black dress, its lining like the inside of a redbird’s wing, my magpie–feathered stripes, my bosom spattered in ink. There was a throne there, and then there was myself seated in it, reigning over the great and frozen unknown.

  I ruled over a kingdom I had not made, but would not surrender, and out there, in the mist, there was no ship and there was no sinner. There was no poet with his quill, writing my world.

  Here in Dream–land would I love and live forever. Here would I contain the soul of the poet, transferred to me in silver and in ink, even as I traded to him the creature I’d harbored.

  I was Annabel Lenore Virginia MacFarlane, and no one would ever find me again.

  ( Editors’ Note: Maria Dahvana Headley is interviewed by Julia Rios in this issue of Uncanny Magazine .)

  © 2017 by Maria Dahvana Headley

  * * *

  Maria Dahvana Headley is The New York Times –bestselling author of the novels Aerie , Magonia (one of PW’s Best Books of 2015), Queen of Kings , and the memoir The Year of Yes . With Kat Howard she is the author of The End
of the Sentence , one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co–editor of Unnatural Creatures . Her short stories have been included in many year’s best anthologies, including the 2016 edition of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy , edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams, and have been finalists for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards.

  Upcoming from editor Sean McDonald at Farrar, Straus & Giroux are The Mere Wife— a novel melding Beowulf to Revolutionary Roa d, and a short story collection. For HarperCollins, she’s at work on The Combustible , a queer superhero and supervillain story, as well as another YA novel. She’s also in development on the theatrical musical The Devil’s Halo , with Emmy Award–winning composer Lance Horne. Find her at @MARIADAHVANA at Twitter, or www.mariadahvanaheadley.com .

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  To Budapest, with Love

  Theodora Goss | 3572 words

  I am seventeen. I am in Budapest, and it is the Communist era. At the airport, there were Russian soldiers with Kalashnikovs patrolling the runways. Only one airline flew to Budapest, the national airline Malev. There were few passengers. I stopped at passport control and showed my American passport. It contains a photograph of me next to my American name. I also have a Hungarian name, but I have not used it for a long time, since my mother changed our names so we could be more American. The passport control officer looked at me suspiciously. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I felt a tightness in my chest, as though my lungs were being squeezed by a giant hand, like the beginning of a panic attack. Then I reminded myself, he probably looks that way at everyone.

  That day, my grandparents, whom I am visiting, let me leave the apartment by myself for the first time. When my mother was seventeen, teenage girls did not walk around the city alone, but I am bored and restless. After all, I’ve been walking myself home from school and letting myself in the front door, then making myself Campbell’s tomato or cream of mushroom soup from concentrate, since I was twelve. So I am allowed to descend two flights of stairs to the ground floor, and cross the street, and walk in the park around the Nemzeti Múzeum. As I walk under the linden trees, I smell something I’ve smelled before: the linden flowers. And I remember holding someone’s hand, and then a swing set, and then flying high in the air, and a song that starts with the words hinta–palinta.

  But I also want to walk in the streets, to see more of Budapest, so I do. Just a block because I don’t want to get lost in this strange city, where no one speaks the only language I understand. The apartment buildings around the park are covered with soot from Trabants and Yugos.

  There, walking down the street, I feel something for the first time that I will feel again many times in my life. Suddenly, it’s as though I am in a spaceship high above the city, looking down on it from above. I can see myself walking along the street: I am so small, inconsequential on this planet spinning through space. It makes sense that I should be in a spaceship looking down, because I only recently became an America citizen. Before that, I was an alien. A legal one, but still.

  Looking down at myself walking along the city street, I think, that poor girl. She doesn’t belong anywhere.

  This is a love story, but not a happy one, and I don’t know how it ends.

  It begins when I am a child, the one swinging into the sky under the linden trees.

  For a long time, I had a green card, which meant I was not yet American.

  But I was no longer Hungarian either. I had lost my ability to speak the language. I went to an American elementary school. After school I watched He–Man and Johnny Quest cartoons. At home, my mother did not insist on Hungarian because how was I going to assimilate unless I spoke in English? So we spoke in English.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, assimilate means to “make like” or “cause to resemble.” I needed to be made like an American child. I needed to at least resemble one. But the word also has a secondary meaning, to “absorb and incorporate.” It was not enough to change me on the outside. I must be changed inside as well. I must become American.

  Years later, I watch Star Trek on television. The Borg Queen says, “You will be assimilated,” and I think, yes. That’s exactly how it happens. It will take me a long time to realize that, ironically, the Borg are supposed to represent Communism.

  When I was eleven, I started reading science fiction. I read about aliens, but not like me. These were science fictional aliens, from other planets. They invaded Earth or they were invaded by Earth. Sometimes they enslaved human beings, sometimes it was the other way around. They wore either spacesuits or primitive clothes that looked like speedos and bikinis, but you know, gold. They were sometimes green, and sometimes resembled cats. Giant space cats. Sometimes they had the cure for all of Earth’s diseases. Sometimes they brought diseases that devastated humanity.

  They never came to Earth and worked in hotels or opened restaurants, although that would have been more realistic.

  There is one constant in alien stories. The alien and human are always in opposition to each other.

  What does that make me, I wonder.

  I started understanding Hungarian again the day I realized it was the opposite of English. Whatever I wanted to say in English, in Hungarian I had to say the opposite. Trying to reason from English to Hungarian always got me into trouble.

  In Hungarian, tegnap is yesterday, not tomorrow.

  Bör is wine, not beer.

  Nyolc is eight, not nine.

  In Hungarian, át does not mean at, but across or through.

  Subject–verb–object, I tell my American university students. That is the basic structure of an English sentence.

  But in Hungarian, it’s object–verb, and the subject is often implied. If I am in Budapest, Budapesten vagjok. I exist only in a case ending.

  I am thirteen. My best friend Amy and I are swinging on the apartment complex swing set. She does not feel human either. Years later, she will write from college to tell me she is in love with another woman, that at some level she has always known she is gay. Marriage equality will still be many years in the future. That day, we talk about how a ship will come down from the sky to take us home. Our home planet is much more exciting than Earth. There, we are princesses. We fly genetically–engineered dragons. We save entire civilizations. We wear clothes of silver mesh, with boots that come up to our thighs. We fight sky pirates.

  Then we kick our legs higher and higher, so we can feel as though we are flying.

  She writes her name Aimée because it’s more exciting. I am still legally Dóra but I write my name Dora because it’s more American. That’s how I’ve been told to write it.

  I continue to not feel human. I am, in fact, not feeling human now, as I sit here looking out the window at the trees in the park around the Nemzeti Múseum. There is a bird somewhere, making a sound like castanets. At first I thought it was some sort of machine.

  I am forty–seven years old, and I have been back many times. I still do not feel at home here, but then I do not feel at home anywhere else either. This is as close to home as I think I’m going to get. Unless a spaceship comes for me, of course.

  Don’t laugh. It could happen.

  When I am twenty–five, I go back to Hungary for the first time since the Berlin Wall fell. Now there are no longer Yugos and Trabants on the road. Now there are Mercedes Benzes parked outside Russian casinos, and beggars sleeping on the streets. Budapest has become a frontier town in the get–rich–quick dreams of the West.

  The last time I saw her, my city was dressed in sackcloth and ashes. Now she parades topless beside the Danube in a show called Girls Sexx Girls . I don’t know what to think of her.

  We have not talked for a long time, and she has become so different. This is called alienation of affection, I think. Someone has taken her away from me, tempted her with money and fame.

  “What happened to you?” I ask.

  Girls Sexx Girls , she answers in neon light.

  The OED tells me that a
lienation has several meanings. First, it is the “state of being estranged.” I have become a stranger to Budapest, and she has become a stranger to me, even though I was born here. I know because it’s the only thing I can read on my birth certificate.

  It also tells me that in Marxist theory, alienation means the “condition of workers in a capitalist economy, resulting from a lack of identity with the products of their labour and a sense of being controlled or exploited.” Do aliens feel that way, I wonder. Do the Borg ever lament their alienation from the methods of production? They mostly seem to run around shouting “Resistance is futile!”

  What about the alien in Alien ? Does she feel discontented? Does she want something better for herself? For her children? Is the entire movie really a metaphor for the revolution, about how if the proletariat don’t get what they want, they will find their way inside the power structure and burst out of its chest? Or am I overthinking this?

  A year after Alien appears in theaters, Ronald Reagan will be elected president. He will call on the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. Once the wall is down, aliens will start invading Western Europe. I don’t know, the timing seems significant.

  When I return from Hungary, I ask my mother why she brought me to America. After all, I’ve lost my city, my country, even my grandparents, who are once again behind the Iron Curtain. When I send them letters, I have to be careful what I write, because my letters will be opened by the police.

  She says, “To give you opportunities you could not have had there.”

  So maybe it’s more like Kara Zor–El’s mother putting her in a spaceship and sending her to earth, where she can become Supergirl. Except I don’t have any superpowers. I can’t fly, and I’m certainly not bulletproof. I’m not even proof against the ordinary teasing and gossip of high school girls. I don’t think I’ll be defeating supervillains anytime soon. I mean, I barely survived calculus.