Generation Loss cn-1

by Elizabeth Hand

  Toby shrugged. “Well, you can go down to the harbor and take your chances, I guess. I wouldn’t. Tempers running high already, and now this thing with Aphrodite. But you can stay at my place if you want.”

  He gestured vaguely at a corner. “There’s a futon.”

  “I have to leave,” I said.

  Toby’s phone rang. “’Scuse me,” he said and ducked into the shadows.

  I stared at the row of monitors. They now appeared to be clocking atmospheric disturbances somewhere east of Subar.

  I got up and started pacing. I searched for a mirror, to see if I looked as crazy as I was starting to feel, but of course there were none, not even a window.

  The bathroom had a shower stall. But no mirror.

  I went to the kitchen and got some more water. Toby stood in the doorway, phone pressed to his ear, and stared into the boiler room, talking to Gryffin again, I assumed. He lifted his hand to me, and I turned away.

  I wandered toward the back of the room again and passed a cluttered table. From underneath it peeked a mask. I stooped and pulled it out, another brightly colored confection made of papier-mâché and chicken wire and acrylic paint.

  It was a frog’s head, like the one I’d seen on Northern Sky. This one was even more eerily totemic. Also surprisingly heavy, as I discovered when I lifted it. I put it over my head, knocking a book off the table as I did.

  Inside, the mask smelled like library paste and hashish. I took it off and put it back where I’d found it then picked up the book.

  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The same book I’d seen in Denny’s bus. I set it on the table, frowning.

  Something else had fallen over, a photo in a cheap plastic frame. I picked it up.

  It was an SX-70 close-up of a naked girl lying on her back, hands splayed beside her face. The film emulsion had been manipulated so that fizzy lines exploded around the edges of the picture. Her hair formed a dark corona around her head, and an eye had been drawn on each of her open palms.

  You couldn’t see her face. It was covered by a tortoise shell that had two more eyes painted on it. In one, someone had painted a tiny green star.

  “What the hell,” I said.

  Toby came up alongside me. “Whatcha looking at?”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  He took it and held it to the light. “Denny. Sort of experimental, isn’t it?” He handed it back and pulled meditatively at his pigtail.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “That was a girl named Hannah Meadows—’Hanner.’ She had a real strong Maine accent. You can’t tell from that, but she was real good-looking.”

  “You can’t tell from this if she was even alive.”

  “Oh, she was alive. She was one of Denny’s girlfriends. He had a bunch of them back then. Bunch of women, bunch of kids. He got into all that tribal stuff.”

  He pointed at the mask beneath the table. “Like that. That took me forever to make. And God, did I sweat in it.”

  “You made that?”

  “Sure. We all had to make our own masks—that was part of the thing. You chose your spirit animal, and then you made the mask, and then we had a ritual, and you were filled with the mask’s energy. That was the theory, anyway,” he said and laughed. “But Hannah, she was a nurse—she worked the night shift at the hospital up past Collinstown. She was beautiful, and something about her—well, a lot of those girls were cute, but Denny just loved to take her picture. She used to model for him all the time. He even talked about marrying her.”

  He whistled. “And boy, Aphrodite, she wasn’t happy about that. And she sure didn’t like him taking all those pictures.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “Oh, that was terrible. Really sad. She got into a car accident driving home one night. In the summer; it was after she got off work. She flipped over the guardrail and went into a lake. She got out of the car okay, but then she never made it to shore. They got the car out of the lake, but she wasn’t in it. Took them almost a week to find the body. Denny was the one found her, he was with the crews out looking. She’d gotten tangled up in some alders along the shore. I guess it was pretty bad. Something had been at the body, some kind of animal. He kind of went off after that, accused Aphrodite of cutting her brakes, though I don’t think they ever found any proof. It was a bad scene. Hey, you okay?”

  His face creased with concern. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

  “C’mere.” He steered me to a chair and made me sit. “Put your head between your knees,” he said. “That’s it. So you don’t faint. Just stay there for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

  He went and got a cold washcloth, pressed it to my forehead. “There. Boy, you look a mess. Maybe you should try to take a nap. Sounds like you had a rough morning over there.”

  “I haven’t eaten anything,” I said, though the last thing I felt like was food. “Do you have some crackers or something?”

  He got me some stale Uneeda Biscuits, also a glass of something cold and brown. “Here, see if this helps.”

  I ate a cracker, took a tiny sip of the brown liquid. “Christ, that’s disgusting! What is it?”

  “Moxie.”

  “It tastes like Dr. Pepper laced with rat poison.”

  “That’s the gentian root.”

  I shoved the Moxie back at him and finished the crackers. Toby raised an eyebrow. “Better?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He puttered into the kitchen. A few minutes later he returned, carrying something. “Denny gave me this last time I saw him, back around Labor Day, when I brought his supplies to Lucien’s house. This is what he’s doing these days.”

  It was a large color photograph, 12x24, in a handmade frame, like the one at Ray Provenzano’s house. From an upright black shape, like a rock or tree, something protruded. A truncated branch, or an arm. Leaves surrounded it, silvery green. It was impossible for me to tell if the color was real or if the emulsion had been tampered with.

  But in other places, the photograph had definitely been distressed, with needles and brushes, maybe a fingernail. Layers of pigment bled through. Handmade color separations, I would bet my life on it: a brilliant serpent green, a murkier, brownish jade, brilliant scarlet, dull orange, porcelain white. A muted, flaking shade of rust, like old iron.

  I ran my finger across the surface, feeling countless little whorls and bumps and scratches, then held it beneath the lamp.

  “There’s leaves in there. And insects,” I said, squinting. “And, I dunno, some kind of bug. A baby dragonfly, maybe?”

  “Where? Oh—yeah, you’re right.” Toby ran his finger along the outline of an insect’s thorax, with tiny, oar-shaped wings. “That’s a damsel fly. A darning needle, we called them when I was a kid. They were supposed to come into your room at night and sew your lips and eyes together while you slept. Denny was scared of them.”

  I looked at the damsel fly. Beside it were scraps of paper, each with a letter on it.

  ST 29

  Part of an address? I brought the print to my face. “Jesus, this is like the other one! It stinks.”

  “Denny’s not much of a housekeeper.”

  “It smells like dead fish, only worse. Skunky.”

  “Well, he sets out a few traps, for lobster. And I know he goes ice fishing in the winter.”

  I was going to ask how you went ice fishing in the ocean, but then I saw something written in the margin.

  Some Rays pass right Through S.P.O.T.

  “‘Some rays pass right through.’” I looked at Toby in surprise. “That’s from a Talking Heads song.”

  “Denny’s big into music. I don’t know it.”

  “It’s about exposing a photograph—that’s what happens, you expose the emulsion paper to the light. Some rays pass right through.”

  I tapped the edge of the photo. Tiny particles rained from it.

  “Ray told me these pictures are worth a lot of money,” I said
. “Denny just gave it to you?”

  “It was payment for some work—I built him a new darkroom a while ago. I do a lot of jobs on barter. I live here free, in exchange for keeping an eye on things. Thinking of which—”

  He crossed the room. “I’ve got to get ready to go.”

  I sat for another minute, examining the photo. A flake of rust-colored pigment came off and stuck to my hand. Where it had been, I could clearly see a torn piece of paper that had been embedded into the emulsion. A fragment of another, a black-and-white photograph of a bare foot with the ghostly outline of a street sign and something scrawled across it in blue ink.

  ICU

  My foot. Canal Street.

  It was a detail from one of the photos in Dead Girls.

  I stared at the flake of pigment then sniffed. It had a faint whiff of that same fishy odor. Cupping it in my palm, I walked to the wastebasket, fished out the wadded-up paper towel I’d just tossed, and smoothed it on the desk.

  You got some paint there on your shoe.

  The smear of blood from where I’d kicked Robert’s friend wasn’t the exact same shade as the flake of dried pigment. But it was close enough.

  I threw the fragment and the paper towel into the wastebasket, ran into the kitchen. Toby was filling a gallon jug from the tap.

  “Listen,” I said. “After you finish your work at this other island—are you coming back here? Or heading straight over to Burnt Harbor?”

  “Depends on the weather. Probably I’ll be back. Unless it really comes down, in which case I’ll drop anchor over at Tolba and stay in Lucien’s house. Why?”

  “Maybe I could ride out with you to the island. Then later, if you do go over to Burnt Harbor, you can drop me off. If not, I’ll just come back here with you.”

  “You really want to get out of here, don’t you? Okay. I guess, if you don’t mind getting cold and wet. I just thought you might want to take a nap or something. You looked pretty whipped, to tell you the truth.”

  “If I fall asleep now, I’ll never wake up.”

  “Don’t want that.” He picked up the jug and headed for the door. “You got much to carry?”

  “No.” I slung my bag over my shoulder. “Just this. My camera.”

  “Good. You can help bring some things down. Then we won’t have to make two trips.”

  He gathered a canvas bag of extra clothing, a toolbox, two water jugs. He stopped by the door and pulled on a parka.

  “Cold out there.” He eyed my leather jacket and cowboy boots. “You’re not going to be warm enough.”

  “I still have your sweater.” I unzipped my jacket to show him, and the sweater rode up, exposing my stomach.

  “That a tattoo?” He stooped to peer at the scroll of words entwined with a scar. “‘Too tough to die.’”

  He gave me an odd look. “Looks like you earned that.”

  I didn’t reply. I thought of a girl walking toward a car beneath a broken streetlamp; of another girl walking down a darkened pier where a boat drifted, its engine cut and running lights switched off.

  “Did it hurt?” asked Toby softly.

  “It all hurts,” I said and turned away.

  For a moment he was quiet.

  “Here,” he said. “Take this—”

  He opened a cupboard and tossed me a blaze orange watchcap. “You lose ninety percent of your body heat through your head. Not that it’ll do you much good if you go overboard.”

  He picked up the toolbox and the canvas bag, gestured at the gallon jugs. “Can you handle those?”

  I pulled on the watchcap and picked up the jugs. “Yeah.”

  “What about this?”

  He reached into the shadows and grabbed a wooden pole about six feet long, tipped with a lethal-looking bronze spike that had a hook like a talon welded to it. He hefted it, eyed it measuringly, then handed it to me.

  “What is it? A harpoon?”

  “Boat hook. For grabbing stuff that falls overboard. Among other things. Like if we run into your friends again outside. You know how to use a boat hook, don’t you? You just put your lips together, and—”

  He mimed smashing someone. “Run like hell. Come on.”

  I followed him outside. I tightened my grip on the boat hook, but the alley was empty.

  “We’ll go this way.” Toby headed around the corner. “Shorter walk.”

  It also avoided that sorry little main drag. A small crowd had gathered at the far end of the beach. I recognized Everett Moss and a few of the other men I’d seen when I first arrived, but not the guys I’d encountered by the Chandlery. Two black dogs played on the rocky beach. There were more boats in the harbor, including a Marine Patrol vessel.

  “Guess that’s how they’ll get Aphrodite back to shore,” said Toby.

  We headed toward the pier. No one seemed to have noticed us yet. They stood in a tight group, heads bent. Now and then someone looked across the reach to the mainland. “’Less they’re waiting for an ambulance boat or something.”

  The sky had grown darker and more ominous. Clouds and sea were the same charred gray. A cold wind seemed to blow from everywhere at once. The black dogs were the same color as the clots of kelp they snapped at. The gulls were like white holes in the sky. Everything seemed to be part of one thing here, even the men in their slate blue coveralls and dun-colored coats and blaze orange vests: They were all like pieces that had broken off from the island but could be made to fit again, if you knew which jagged part went where.

  I used the boat hook like a walking stick and tried not to lag behind Toby. A dog spied us and ran across the shingle, barking. The men all turned. I half expected someone to shout at us—at me—but they said nothing. Their silence unnerved me, but after a minute they turned away again.

  Toby waited for me on the pier. “How you doing?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He held out a hand, steering me up the granite steps, and we walked to the dinghy. I felt exposed and went as fast as I could, my boots skidding on the slick surface. We reached the dinghy and climbed in. Toby rowed to where the Northern Sky was moored, climbed up on deck, and set down his things. I handed him what I’d brought, and he helped me on board.

  “You get this stuff stowed below while I tie up the dinghy. Those water jugs go under the sink down in the galley. The rest of that stuff, just put it so we don’t trip on it.”

  I started for the companionway then paused.

  “I might want to take some pictures out here. You going to let me use my camera this time?”

  Toby loosened a line from a cleat. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “How come you had a problem with it yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t sure yet whether or not you were going to be a problem.”

  I felt oddly pleased and gave him a wry smile. He looked at me. “You still don’t have a mirror, do you?”

  “Nope.” I stared back, then asked, “The mirror game. Suze told me that was something Denny used to do with everyone.”

  He said nothing.

  “What was it?” I prodded. “Was it something about that girl? Hannah?”

  “No.” He sighed. “It really was a game. We’d get really stoned, then you’d just stare into the mirror until your face started to look all weird, like it was melting or something. The way if you repeat the same word over and over, it starts to sound funny? Like that. It was silly. But then Denny started to do some other stuff. He was reading a lot about primitive religions; he started making up these rituals. That was pretty silly too, at first. But then it just started to get bizarre. He started believing in the stuff he’d made up. He’d force people to do things—look at yourself in the mirror for an hour, three hours. He did it once for a whole day. All day, all night. It—”

  He shook icy rain from his parka and shivered. “I was with him. I did it too—stared at myself in this big mirror. Every time I started to nod off he’d poke me. After a while he stopped, but he wasn’t asleep. He just sat the
re and stared at himself, and then he started whispering to himself. Just kept saying the same thing over and over. Like Chinese water torture.” He glanced at me. “That was when I knew I’d had enough. I got the hell out of there and got a job at Rankin’s Hardware for a few months, just to kind of normalize myself. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t stand it now, seeing myself in a mirror.”

  He stared at the sky and shook his head, as though remembering.

  “What was he saying?” I asked.

  “‘I see you.’” He shielded his eyes from the rain. “‘I see you, I see you. I see you.’ That was all.”

  Abruptly he turned and clapped my shoulder. “Go on now. You better get that stuff below.”

  I climbed down the companionway and stowed the boat hook and water jugs and my bag. Toby joined me a few minutes later.

  “I’ve got some extra foul-weather gear.” He rooted through a cupboard. “You’ll ruin those cowboy boots of yours, sliding around in the salt water. See if these fit.”

  The anorak fit, but the Wellingtons were way too big. I said, “I think I better stick with my boots.”

  “Suit yourself. Just be careful. Give me a hand with the rest of this stuff.”

  It took me a few trips to get everything stowed below. Toby moved quickly and efficiently across the deck, seeming impervious to cold and sleet. When he finished, he beckoned toward the companionway.

  ’We’ll motor past the point there. Going straight into the wind like this, it would take us three times as long to sail. If the wind changes direction, we might motorsail.”

  He squinted as icy spray gusted across the deck. “This could be rough. Think you’ll be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?” He looked me up and down. “You feel bad, you can try going below. I don’t think that helps much, myself. You’re better here on deck where you can feel the wind. There’s life jackets there—”

  He cocked his thumb at several orange vests and a life preserver. “Not that they’ll do you much good. You go overboard, you’ve got eight minutes before hypothermia kicks in. That’s how they train kids down at the yacht club—they throw ‘em in the harbor and toss ‘em a life preserver to help get ‘em to shore.”