“You’re a musician?” He’s not looking at you when you say it, though, and you have to repeat.
He shakes his head. “Luthier,” he says. His eyes slide shyly aside. “I make instruments for other people. Do you want to see my shop?”
You put on your boots, which he must have rescued from the cave also. When you get outside in the cold, you realize that the school bus is parked in a clearing in the midst of a winter-bare multiflora rose and blackberry bramble, the canes bent and the sprays of withered crimson hips, no bigger than the head of a big sewing pin, bowed under tiny hats of snow. Beyond them, reached by tunnel-like paths that Marty must clear with a machete during the growing season, lies a ring of trees—the border of the woods, with its cave and its mermaid.
Other than the cold and the thorns, the first thing you notice when you step outside is the hum of a diesel generator, isolated off to the side in a little tin shack, its feet propped off the ground on cinder blocks. Marty’s “shop” proves to be a wooden shed, also on blocks from what you can see through the snow, up against the side of the school bus so the bus serves as a windbreak. On the far side is the rusted out corpse of a DeSoto, the hood tatted to lacework by years.
The shed’s other three walls have hay bales stacked against them, which might make you worry about fire, but the hay looks so wet it wouldn’t burn if you soaked it in gasoline.
When he opens the door, heat comes out like a sticky wall. You hear the crackle of a woodstove in here too, and smell sharp sweet frankincense. A handful of resin smokes on the iron stove lid, giving the sixteen by sixteen room funereal or cathedral airs. Sawdust covers the floor inside, worktables lining every wall, lathes and sanders greased and dirty. Shaker pegboards circle eighteen inches below the topwall, unfinished instruments dangling by their necks. Dulcimers, yes. Mandolins, basses, guitars. A single white unsanded fiddle hanging from a neck like the wrung neck of a swan, like the curled tendril of a fern.
You draw a breath full of sawdust and incense and think, Too perfect. You might even say it, but Marty wouldn’t hear you, and sometimes talking to yourself is really talking to be overheard. So you wait until he turns to check your reaction, moving into the warm shop with the snow dripping off your cuffs, and you say, “You made all these?”
“Every one.” He reaches out and taps the hull of a double bass, the face striped purpleheart and rosewood and something gold. It thumps like a melon, sweet and ripe, so you wonder if he can feel the resonance through lingering fingertips.
“Do you sell them?” You want to touch the jazz guitar hanging over the lathe. Its faceplate is honey-colored, riddled with holes from worms that must have worked in the tree after it was fallen. The neck is mahogany, and it too has small scars, the imperfections of salvaged wood.
“I give them away,” he says, and lifts down the guitar you were eyeing. It’s finished and strung; he sets an electric tuner on the bench and bends over the strings. You probably couldn’t tune as fast by ear as he does in his deafness.
When he’s done, he scoops up the beast and holds it out to you like a toddler, archtop gleaming under the worklights. It’s strung left-handed, and you wonder how he knew.
He says, “Care to try her?”
Your cold-stung fingers itch for it. “Give them away?” you ask. “How can you afford that?”
He gestures around and grins. “It doesn’t take a lot of money to live like this, and I made some when I was young. When I still played myself, a little. Go on, take the guitar.”
He has a point there. So you lift the guitar off his palms and stroke it for a second, finding where your hands should fall. You glance up, about to ask him what he wants to hear, and find him staring at your fingers. Oh, of course.
So you pick out a Simon and Garfunkel tune, because it’s easy and fun and suits the instrument. And then you play a little Pete Seeger something, until your cracked fingertips start to more-than-sting. You don’t bother singing: Marty’s not listening, and you want to hear the guitar. You’d give it back, but it feels good in your arms, close and friendly, so you let it sit there and puppy-snuggle for a minute while you chat. You play a couple of bars of “Peggy Sue” and a couple of bars of “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and it all sounds good. You expect a little buzz at the bottom of the neck, but it’s clean all the way down.
“Who do you give them away to?”
“Deserving folks,” he says. “Folks with music people listen to. Folks whose music makes a better world. That one’s yours.”
Your right hand locks on the neck. “I can’t take this.”
“I made it for you,” he says. “The siren called you, Missy. There’s no two ways about it. That there’s your guitar.”
You’d have expected to be too ill and exhausted to continue your vest-pocket tour, but you wake up rested and strong on Thursday, and in fine voice as if in spite of having been half-drowned in ice water and left on the stones. You hum to yourself in the mirror while you fix your hair, and you pick out a white button shirt and patchwork vest with swingy glass bead fringe across the chest to pull on over threadbare jeans. Spiked up hair and too much makeup gives you cheekbones that will read from stage. You’re getting too old for the scapegrace gamine shtick.
At the last minute, as you’re packing up the Toyota, you decide to bring the new guitar.
Boston and Albany are great, better than good, CDs flying out of the booth, and in Albany you pick up a gig in Portsmouth for May and a business card from a booking agent who sounds six kinds of excited and impressed.
“You’re a lot better live,” she says, tossing bottle-red hair behind her shoulder. “We need to get you into bigger venues, get some quality production on those CDs.”
You think you like her.
Two weeks later, when you make it back to play for the Eddies again, you’ve figured out something is up. The crowd treats you differently since the mermaid. It’s not about the guitar, nice as the guitar is, because you experiment with using other instruments and it doesn’t seem to change anything.
You have to stop yourself from scanning the crowd for the mermaid. She won’t be here, you tell yourself, wondering why it’s so hard to believe.
It’s no surprise when Little Eddie sidles up after the second set and asks you for a return booking in another four weeks, at the same fee. You tell him you have to check your calendar and your booking agent will call him. You make a note to negotiate him up, and sharply.
But when he walks away, you catch Big Eddie looking over the bar at you and you can see the shine in her eyes. That rattles you. Big Eddie doesn’t get like that. She never lets anything get under her skin.
You walk over on the excuse of a beer—the second set ends and the café closes before last call, so it’s still legal to serve—and drape yourself over a stool.
Big Eddie slides it in front of you and says, “What did you do to your voice?”
“Does it sound bad?” You clear your throat, sip beer, and try again. “I kind of fell in some water and wound up with hypothermia on a hike, and it’s sounded funny since.”
You didn’t miss the way your voice has changed, and not just the timbre: it’s your phrasing and your range as well. It took a little while and some messing around with a digital recorder to understand what you were hearing. The tentativeness, the derivative garage-band sound the mermaid commented on, have been washed from your music, leaving something etched and rough-edged and labyrinthine as sea caves.
You love it. You haven’t been able to stop singing—to the cat, to yourself, in the shower, walking down the street—since she kissed you. Your new voice fills you up, clothes you in bright glory. You know how everyone else who hears it feels, because you feel it too.
Eddie says, “No, no. It sounds great. But it doesn’t sound like you.”
You have to bang on the door of Marty’s shop to get his attention. When the door creaks open on sawdust-clogged hinges, he blinks at the brightness of sun off snow and covers it by pushing up his safety
glasses. “Problem with the guitar, Missy?”
“Actually, just the opposite,” you say, shaping the words so he can read them on your lips and tongue. “The guitar is wonderful. It’s something else I need to give back, and I was hoping you’d come with me. Because I don’t know what I’ll do if I hear her singing. I’d really—” You look down in embarrassment, force yourself to look up again. If he can’t see your face, he can’t understand what you’re saying. “—I’d really owe you one.”
You already owe him one. More than one. Closer to a dozen. Your impression that he’s a good guy is reinforced by the fact that he hangs the goggles on a nail inside the shop threshold, pulls his coat and gloves on without a word, and only pauses long enough to padlock the door.
You go down into the earth like pilgrims, making obeisance to the gods of deep places, sometimes scraping on your bellies over rough stones. Marty takes you deeper and by different passages than you went before, and all you can do is follow. You can’t talk to him in the dark, not unless you make him turn and shine his light into your face, and so you listen to what he has to say instead.
“I had a daughter your age,” he says, and you notice the verb tense and don’t ask, just let your fingers brush the back of his wrist. In the cave, echoing from stone, shimmering from the moving surface of the underground river, his voice takes on the resonances and harmonics that have come to invest your own.
But then he adds, “She was a guitar player too.” And, after another moment, “Kids are stupid. And maybe God protects fools, drunks, and musicians, but all three at once is a bit much to ask of anybody.”
You touch his shoulder in the dark, and realize it wasn’t the deafness that made him give up playing. He leans into it for a second before walking forward, placing feet carefully on the rippled stones, ducking sideways to bend under a low roof. Water’s worn scallops on the floor of the cave; they look like ripples in sand where a river’s flowed over it. Wave patterns, sine patterns, like sound.
Water and music are the same thing, at the core.
You stop at the edge of a pool deeper and wider and even more pellucid than the one in which you met the mermaid before. The water moves only where slow drips scatter into it from the ceiling, the beam of your flashlight and Marty’s scattering where they’re reflected.
You half-expected the mermaid to be waiting, maybe even for her to sing you in, but the only sound is the arrhythmic plink of droplets. She’s taken what she wanted and given what she chose to give. She’s done and the rest is yours now.
Except you want it all to be yours, earned, not borrowed glory. You wonder if Marty—if anyone—can get her to let you go this time, let you come up out of the darkness again. You wonder if she’ll be angry that you’re rejecting her gift. You wonder what she’ll say, and if she’ll curse you.
You breathe deep of wet air to fill yourself up, and nerve yourself to call her up with your song. Because even if it’s quick and easy, even if you’ve already paid for it, even if it’s the most beautiful sound you’ll ever make, you don’t want to echo her voice forever.
You want to grow your own.
Driftglass
Samuel Delany
I
Sometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin grafts from my chest, so what’s left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, ’midst general blondness.
By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp ceded me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder, which I can no longer play, and my books.
But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging to the sea, searching for driftglass.
It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked.
She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. “What are you doing here, huh?” She narrowed blue eyes.
“Looking for driftglass.”
“What?”
“There’s a piece.” I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg.
“Where?” She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone.
While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn’t looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else.
“See?”
“What . . . what is it?” She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the backs of mine.
“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”
“Ohhh!” she breathed as the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision.
She watched the ruin calmly.
Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness.
The insignia on her buckle—her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air told me she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons.
She reached for my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. “Who are you?” Finally.
“Cal Svenson.”
She slid back down in the water. “You’re the one who had the terrible . . . but that was years ago! They still talk about it, down . . . ” She stopped.
As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast.
“You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago . . . ”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“I was two years older than you w
hen the accident happened.”
“You were eighteen?”
“I’m thirty-one now. Which means it happened over a dozen years ago. It is a long time.”
“They still talk about it.”
“I’ve almost forgotten,” I said. “I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?”
“I used to.”
“Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I’ll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch—”
“I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew.” She paused, smiled. “But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty.”
On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, “Oh, look!” and “Did you do this yourself?” a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn’t get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen Oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I’m a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls.
II
“Hey, Juao!” I bawled across the jetty.
He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front I squatted.
“I fished out over the coral where you told me.” He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. “You come up to the house for a drink, eh?”
“Fine.”
“Just . . . a moment more.”
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Page 3