“I used to know the guy who owned this place. One of my best customers. Nicodemus Satan Cannibal Jr. He took his name off the old inmate who ran the joint before him. Then he left it to some kid he trained. Nicodemus Satan Cannibal III. Pieces of work, all of ’em.”
“Like a succession of kings,” Swanny murmurs. Or like the Ripples, she thinks.
Sharkey signals the maître d’. “Hey, Rollo. Seat us in the box.”
When Swanny was just a girl, Corona used to speak of thin places, locales where the membrane separating this world from the next was stretched to its outer limit, an unguarded border between the countries of Before and After. Swanny has never before visited such a place in waking life, but tonight, reality feels permeable. She’s uncertain how long she’s been floating, viewing the dining room from the perspective of a lost soul above an operating table. She wonders how long she’s been clutching Sharkey’s hand.
“Don’t try to fight it,” he advises her. His touch is her only tether to the physical world. His dusky red aura enhalos her body, holding her inside. “It’s only chemicals.”
“Yes, but Howie, what does that even truly mean?” Her own voice sounds so very muffled and distant; she wonders if it’s audible to human ears. “Love, hate, fear, joy—desire—religious ecstasy—imagination—perception itself—our entire interface with reality and the universe as we know it—can’t every last one be attributed to a series of enzymatic reactions in the petri dish of the mind? Aren’t they all ‘only chemicals’ too?”
“If you could see your pupils right now, you’d know what I’m talking about.”
With a pop, the chair asserts itself beneath Swanny at last; her spirit reattaches to her physical form. They’re at a table in a balcony, just the two of them, a brass guardrail holding at bay the hubbub below.
“Atta girl,” Sharkey says. “Stay with me.”
The waiter arrives, a singularly unappetizing individual. Three of the fingers are missing from his right hand, and even before he speaks, his jittery energy upsets whatever weak equilibrium Swanny has achieved. “Mr. Sharkey, good to see you again, sir. Would the two of you like to start with something to drink?”
“She needs to get some food in her stomach,” Sharkey pronounces. “What are the specials?”
“Tonight we have the chef’s singular rat balls, at least seventy percent freshly harvested rat meat and less than eight percent sawdust, served on a bed of something we found—reminds me of polenta. It’s good.”
“You got anything a little less revolting? She’s from Outside.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can eat,” says Swanny. It’s the most curious thing yet: a fog is rolling in, gray and muddlesome, and with it comes the sensation that the room is filling up—not merely with vapors, but with presences, malevolent and otherwise. “Not in this weather we’re having.”
“You’ll eat,” Sharkey tells her. He turns back to the waiter. “Anything with less than twenty-two percent unaccounted for?”
“You always were a numbers man,” the waiter concedes, glancing at his missing fingers. Tendrils of miasma nudge the stumps. The smog warms its thin hands, and falls asleep. “For the diner discerning enough to request another option, there’s these cans of dead dog. All ground up, we’ve been mixing it with noodles. That’s the stroganoff.”
Sharkey is skeptical: “Never had dog meat from a can.”
“It’s got a picture of a dog on the label.” Following a menu’s logic is impossible in this murk; Swanny wonders why he can’t just leave them be.
“That means it’s for a dog, not from a dog. Listen, let’s save some time here. I want you to go downstairs and tell your chef to make something fit for human consumption. We’ll take two of those.”
At last, the waiter phases out of view. The fog now fills Swanny’s entire frame of vision; even just across the table, Sharkey seems so far away.
“What’s happening to me?” she asks. “I’m up in the clouds and I can’t come down.”
“They’re not clouds. And those weren’t snowflakes either.”
“No?”
“Nah. They’re smoke and ashes. Ashes, then smoke. Passing through.” Sharkey takes out his chaw wallet, removes a one-penny plug. “Bringing back what they took.”
“What do you mean?”
He works his jaw on the dose. “When something’s gone, it’s gone for good. But it leaves a space behind. A negative space. It used to be that when I chewed, I’d see smoke and ashes dusting over all the negative spaces. Making it so I could see what was missing. Sounds like that’s starting to happen to you.”
“But you said the things I’d see wouldn’t be real.”
“They ain’t. Not anymore.” Unlike the waiter, Sharkey is a familiar of these mists. His melancholy allows him to dissolve, ever so slightly, into the air she breathes.
“How did you learn to make chaw?” she asks.
“Same way the last Nick learned to run this place. An old inmate taught me.”
“Your father?”
“Not all of us grew up so cherished as yourself.”
The waiter returns triumphantly: “We had a couple of these left in the deep freeze. Less than a year past expiration.”
GRANDMA BETTY’S MILITARY RATIONS, reads a logo printed on the clear plastic wrapper affixed to the top of the tray. Inside, a bloodless slab of protein lies alongside mysterious purees of yellow, green, and orange. ♥ HEART HEALTHY ♥
“I liked this place better under the old management,” grumbles Sharkey. But for once, Swanny isn’t focused on her food. The waiter startles as she grasps him by the wrist.
“How extraordinary,” she murmurs, examining his ruined hand. Where earlier she saw only stumps, she now sees fingers, tapering to elegant completion, rendered in translucent grayscale. The lined knuckles, the nails, even the whorling prints, are all delicately visible, sculpted from the ether. “But wait. This didn’t happen in a fire.”
The waiter glances at Sharkey uncertainly. Sharkey answers for him: “Not a fire.” As soon as she loosens her grip, the waiter skitters away.
The smoke dissipates, like the ashes before it. Swanny is out on a date with her mother’s killer, a murderer of children, and an apparent torturer too. She looks longingly down at the dining hall below. A saw player has joined the bucket drummer, and the parquet floor is filling up with writhers and swayers.
“I’d like to dance,” she says. She doesn’t add, alone. But he hears it anyway.
“Stay where I can see you. And leave your coat.”
Swanny descends to the dining hall below. Without Sharkey’s anchoring presence, the floaty feeling returns, but this time she doesn’t discorporate; instead, she’s light, so very light that her feet barely skim the ground. She’s been heavy all her life: heavy of flesh, heavy of heart. But now, for the first time in recollection, gravity is her friend. She moves into the crowd of torchies—sparkers, cocottes all—and they move together, almost weightless, particles agitated by a flame.
Enjoy life, for our sake.
You will never die.
She lets herself forget.
Swanny only stops dancing when she notices the cat. Or rather, the space a cat left behind. The feline phantasm slips between the feet of revelers, as lithe as a magician’s scarf. Swanny works her way out from the throng to follow it as it stalks between the tables, finally leaping atop one to lap at an abandoned jar of Embalming Fluid.
“Here, kitty,” Swanny coos, and the specter looks up, alarmed. Its ears are frayed, its left eye gouged; in its place is a hollow socket, seeping ectoplasm. A one-eyed hooch-drinking ghost cat. But Swanny’s never had a pet, and it’s too late to be choosy now. She takes another step toward it, and the cat leaps down, darting into the shadows, past an Emergency Exit sign and down a dim hallway to the right of the stage. Swanny isn’t quite sure why she follows, but she does.
“Kitty?” she calls, scaling some wooden steps, pushing open an ajar door marked PERFORMERS O
NLY. But Felis domesticus is hiding, or else dematerialized. Swanny takes a look around. She’s standing on the forsaken stage. The scene is still set for some long-ago production, most likely a musical or cabaret; two chairs face each other across a narrow table and instruments rest here and there, collecting dust. One in particular attracts her attention. It’s as though it’s been left out just for her.
Swanny once called the klangflugel a “tuned typewriter,” because that’s what it resembles. The instrument before her now poises on its rickety stand, brass and badly kept, its winglike bellows faded at the creases. Swanny places her fingers on the keys, forty-one little metal disks indented for her fingertips—specifically for her fingertips—and taps out a few soft chords. The velvet curtain is thick enough to dampen the music; if she keeps it pianissimo, no one will notice she’s back here.
“Close the door behind you.”
Swanny looks up. Her mother sits over at the table, glowing gray and transparent, smoking a cigarette. The puffs leaving her mouth look just like the rest of her, but while they dissolve, Pippi stays. Her left arm is invisible where it touches the light slanting in from backstage.
“Mother,” Swanny says. She wonders at her own unsurprise. But of course this is exactly whom she’s journeyed here to meet.
“Come in or go out, but make a decision. There’s a draft.”
Swanny shuts the door. Her mother lights candles on the table as if she’s performing a séance. Swanny takes the seat across from her and watches the flames.
“I hope this isn’t the sort of place you frequent,” Pippi says. “A man won’t take you seriously once he’s seen you dance.”
“Women in general, or just me?”
“That applies to all women, darling, even the ones who dance well.”
Pippi flicks her ash off into the air, but it evaporates to nothing before it sprinkles the tabletop.
“Mother, I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I didn’t use to. It’s like we always used to say at McGuffin: ‘You can smoke when you’re dead!’ ” She laughs brightly. “We had such gallows humor about it all. Scavengers feeding on a corpse. ‘Content will be the last industry to go,’ we said, and we were right. But it all goes eventually. It all goes, so you have to snatch it while you can.”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s not advice, Swanny, that’s a statement of fact. You don’t merely want to survive. You must do what it takes to thrive. Always. My mother was a survivor, and I can tell you that woman had nothing to teach me. Do you know what’s the best cure for dishpan hands? Suicide.”
“Grandma committed suicide?”
“No, but I would have if I were her. Or rather, I would have killed my stepfather and made it look like an accident.”
“You’ve never really talked about them before.”
“You’re a grown-up now. All bets are off.”
“I don’t think I’m so very grown up.”
“Nonsense. Of course you are. You’ve taken charge of your own life, and that’s more than most women do at any age.”
“I’m a traitor to everything I once believed.”
“You’re a risk taker.”
The question comes out in a rush, without preamble: “I hope Howie didn’t kill those little boys. Can you tell me if he did?”
“Sharkey is safeguarding his reputation, which is entirely sensible, given his line of work. One can’t allow all kinds of nonsense to keep circulating; it’s a PR disaster. And my personal differences with him aside, I think you should respect his privacy. You’re not responsible for what he does.”
“I know he killed you.”
“That’s between him and me, dear. I appreciate your concern, but don’t go poking your head in where it doesn’t belong.”
“Do you mean you’ve formed…some kind of alliance with Sharkey?”
“Who made the chaw you chewed tonight?”
“I…”
“Oh come now, Swanny, I know you’re on drugs. I saw you dancing.”
Chastened, Swanny looks down at the table. There she sees a series of images from her childhood depicted, via the swirling candlelit wood grain, in etching-like detail. In one, little Swanny discovers a half-dead rabbit, caught in a trap amid the high grasses. In another, she and her mother play a hand of Guillotine at the dining table while Corona serves them after-dinner Sauternes. In a third, sick and delirious, she clings on tight as her bed floats out the window into the night sky.
“You’re having a drug experience right now.”
“I suppose I am,” Swanny admits. She stares into her mother’s face. The features are all there, even the tune-up scar, yet they’re also sharply absent. Through Pippi’s translucence, Swanny can see the stage set’s backdrop, a dusty canvas painting of an antique, lamplit street. “Mother, I miss you. I never thought I would, but I miss you so.”
“Keep tempo,” says Pippi. “Don’t get distracted. You were born for great things, Swanny. I know you won’t disappoint me.”
Swanny looks back down at her hands and watches them moving upon the klangflugel keys. She hadn’t even realized she was singing:
Take me up, Mother, to your kingdom of the sky
My wings are beating and my fire won’t die
I don’t need a machine to fly
I don’t need a machine to fly
I don’t need a machine to fly
Into the sky—ohhh
Your kingdom of the sky…
The music moves through her hands, her throat, with such force that it seems like it could never stop without destroying her, but then at long last, she raises her trembling fingers from the keys and she’s still there, she’s still standing, and where the stage’s curtain used to be there are a hundred sooty-sweaty faces gazing up at her from the dance floor, silent, waiting to see what she’ll do next.
* * *
Sharkey is waiting for her at the stage door in his endless top hat, that long tunnel of satiny dark. Chewing.
“Have a nice visit?” he asks, in the tone of voice he uses to answer his own questions.
“You’re a sorcerer.” She takes a step nearer. Gravitating toward him. She hasn’t forgotten the names of colors. His eyes are Caviar, Inkwell, Black Magic. “A necromancer. You kill, yes, but when you cook the chaw, you bring back what you took. Your art—it isn’t just a drug. It’s access to the beyond. You have that power.”
“You say that like you’re surprised.”
“I didn’t understand before, but now I do. That’s why death has no meaning for you, isn’t it? Because you’ve risen above it.”
“Dead still means dead, Swanny. Nothing you see is ever gonna change that.”
Swanny has always been attracted to Sharkey, from the very first moment his hearse pulled up at the curb beside her, when he was just a faceless voice in a death car. Only now, though, does that attraction insist upon itself as a basic human need. She melts into him, pressing the words into his zoot suit lapel: “But you made me see.”
“Yeah. That’s what I do.” He helps her on with her coat; the fur is so welcoming it’s as though he’s tucking her into bed. “You’ve got a secret power yourself. Who taught you to sing like that?”
“I always wanted to.” She thinks back to the klangflugel lessons of her childhood, the dreaded tock of the metronome, her mother checking off missed notes on the score. She caresses his chest. Inside, his heart is keeping its own kind of time. “Take me home, Howie.”
Then they’re in the limo. Swanny is shocked at her own behavior; desire has seized her, turned her body into its shuddering puppet. Before the vehicle even moves, they paw and tongue and yearn, crushed against each other on the banquette.
“Kiss me, oh, kiss me.” Utter surrender may be violent, but sometimes violence is the only solution the fallen can know. Damn the whole vexatious torment of the last fortnight. “How can I want you so badly when I’m already in your arms?”
“ ’Cause that ain’t a
ll you want.” She has to admit, he’s absolutely right.
Dragons: if they didn’t exhale, would their heat sizzle them from the inside? Just as the limo pulls away, the old theater explodes behind them.
“I left something behind,” Sharkey says. “Just for you.”
Roman candles and bottle rockets and jumping jacks unnerve the blackened sky. Former untorchables run out, on fire, screaming. Swanny can’t tear her eyes away from the window. It’s just like her vision the day she arrived in Torchtown: people made of magma, dissolving and consuming one another constantly.
Sharkey wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close again. He tells her, “Don’t be scared. I got ya. Shhh. You can shut your eyes.”
When she opens them again, they’re back at the Chaw Shop, embracing against the inside of the door. Her coat drops to the floor; she thinks of her mother’s fox fur carelessly strewn in the Ripple lobby. That’s how to know you’re home, when you can toss your things anywhere.
“Am I hurting you?” Sharkey presses his finger against her gum, where the tip of a pointed canine is just about to break through.
“It feels rather…good, actually.” Her tongue moves against his knuckle when she speaks.
“It’s euphoria. Everything’s euphoric right now. That’s what chaw does. Releases the pain. Lets it all out.” His hand moves away from her mouth. There’s blood on his fingertip. He touches it to his lips. “Come upstairs.”
“I suppose I should warn you now. My husband says I’m frigid.”
Sharkey places his palm against her forehead. It’s a sensation Swanny has felt a thousand times before, sick in bed as a child, when Corona or the dentist would come to take her temperature. But it’s never felt like this. What a sensation it is to be reached for. To be the place where flesh meets flesh. To be alive, still, after everything. She shuts her eyes. Tonight, he will possess her, leave her naked and bitten and filled with him, no inch of her untasted or unconsumed. But this is how it starts: his palm against her brow.
“You’re burning up,” he says.
PART THREE
The Sky Is Yours Page 37