‘I smelled a woman,’ Dragon Dog said. ‘Unmistakably.’
Dingo whined in disagreement.
‘No, I grant you it didn’t look like a woman, but nonetheless that’s what I smelled.’ Dragon Dog sniffed. ‘Dingo says the person watching you looks like a cloud of darkness with eyes.’
‘Tall,’ she said, half hysterically, trying to remember what Madame Delubovoska had looked like in that long-ago child-hood time. ‘Very thin. With black, black hair and brows.’
‘She smells like black hair, yes. Thin, with very black hair and a bad disposition.’
Dingo whined again.
‘Well, that’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ Dragon Dog growled. ’Dingo insists on “evil disposition” rather than merely bad.’
‘There’s only one person it could be. Madame Delubovoska. My half brother’s aunt.’ Shaken out of her tenuous composure, lost in a seeming reality of danger, Marianne ran to the phone and punched long distance, jittering from foot to foot as she waited for an answer, telling herself she was not really calling, that it was only a dream call for which she would never receive a bill …
‘Mama? How are you? How’s Papa?
‘Oh, yes, I miss everyone. And everything. Listen, are you all right? Is everyone there OK? No, nothing’s wrong. I just got homesick, I guess.’
In the quiet apartment, the five momentary gods scratched, sniffed, groomed themselves, and nibbled at itchy places while Marianne concluded her conversation. ‘Madame hasn’t done anything to them,’ she said at last. ‘Not to Mama, or Papa. Last time – that other time, didn’t she do something to them, first?’
‘This is a new time,’ said the Black Dog in his great, baying voice. ‘This is a new time. And in this time, you may wish to put an end to the danger once and for all, Marianne. When you decide what you want to do … call on us.’
He turned and walked into the wallpaper. When she turned, the others were gone, Dingo’s tail just disappearing into a kitchen cabinet.
When she decided what she wanted to do?
What could she do?
She raised her hand to her forehead, rubbing it, the pendant crystal that Makr Avehl had given her twinkling in the light from her west window. When she woke up, she would really call home.
She lay down on the couch, shutting her eyes. It was only a vision. Overwork. Homesickness. Stress. Reversion to an infantile fantasy life. She breathed deeply, willing herself to go into deep, unconscious sleep. She would wake, and it would be gone – all of it. Only a dreamed up nonsense put together from fairy tales and recollections. The dogs were only her memory of the dogs that had attacked Harvey. The dark woman was only a remake of Disney’s Snow White with its evil, hollow-cheeked queen. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ she chanted to herself defiantly.
Black Dog stuck his head out of the mirror and said in a stern voice, ‘Mockery does not become you, Marianne.’
She turned over on the sofa pillow and wept herself truly asleep.
CHAPTER SIX
When she awoke in the morning, she tried to convince herself it had all been hallucination, brought about by stress, incited by the unpleasant gifts that someone had sent her. Staring at her own face in the mirror, she was unable to decide whether she really believed this or not. Before she went to work, she asked Pat Apple not to accept any more mail that had to be signed for. ‘I don’t care what it is, Pat. Letter, package, leaflet, registered mail – just don’t sign for it. Let them leave me a notice and I’ll pick it up. That box you signed for was a nasty joke, and it exploded when I opened it…’
‘Exploded!’ Pat screamed. ‘My god, Marianne …’
‘No damage done. It was all a joke. But it made a rotten smell, and I don’t want any more. So, okay?’
‘If I had friends who did things like that, they’d get a piece of my mind,’ Pat grumbled. ‘Honestly. Do I need to fumigate up there or anything? Deodorize?’
‘It’s all right now. Just don’t accept anything else.’
She left feeling both prudent and dissatisfied, as though there were something else she should have done but could not remember. Some precaution in addition to the one she had just taken. What had this vague threat amounted to after all? Someone had played a couple of nasty jokes on her that had evoked her childhood fantasies, that’s all. Nothing of any moment. Nothing she wasn’t able to deal with – mostly by ignoring it.
And yet, perhaps there was something else she should have done. Something. On her wrist, the crystal bracelet sparkled in the morning light, unregarded. She was too preoccupied to notice it.
The day passed without incident. Friday followed, placid as a summer meadow. The weekend came and went. She did her laundry, went to a movie, told herself she had gotten over it, whatever it had been.
Monday, when she came home from work, there were chalk marks on the walk, looping swirls of yellow and red chalk, vertiginous spirals extending from the gate to the porch. Something inside her lurched, as though some essential organ had turned over, realigning itself into an unaccustomed position. Marianne gritted her teeth and crossed the lines, stepping from space to space in the design as though the marks had been barriers, surprised to find herself doing it without thought, more surprised to feel the wave of sheer terror that washed over her and was as unaccountably gone in the instant.
Pat was on the porch. ‘Who’s been messing up the side-walk?’ Marianne asked, looking back at the writhing lines, wondering what had just happened.
‘Kids playing hopscotch, I suppose,’ Pat said vaguely, fanning herself with a magazine. ‘Doesn’t really look like the hopscotch I remember, but things change. The marks were there about noon when I went out to get the mail. Funny. I did just what you did, walked in the spaces. A holdover from childhood, don’t you suppose? It’s been so hot today, I’ve been falling asleep all afternoon.’
Pat still looked half asleep, as though drugged, and her enervation seemed to be catching. It was like yawning, Marianne thought, opening her eyes wide and shaking her head. You see someone yawn, and it makes you yawn. She felt the same energy-draining lassitude Pat seemed to be feeling. It had not been this hot earlier; almost tropical. And wet. The stairs were an endless climb, as though to some precipice.
There were more curiously twisted chalk marks on the upstairs hall floor and one on her apartment door. Some children must have come into the hallway and played around – Pat Apple often left the entry door unlocked. Marianne did not have the energy to rub the design out. Her key turned effortlessly.
The door opened.
Her eyes on the chalk marks, she went through …
In Alphenlicht, Makr Avehl sat up in bed, a shout trembling on his lips. There had been a flash, a very vivid flash. Some-one knocked on his door.
‘Come in, Ellat.’
‘Something’s happened to her, Makr Avehl.’
‘I know. I felt it.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to try to reach her …’
‘She won’t be there.’
‘You think not?’ He belted a robe around himself, rubbing his face with both hands.
‘I know not. The crystal wouldn’t have flashed if she were still there. She’s been moved. Like last time.’
‘Not quite. No. I don’t think she consented verbally this time. It’s some other variety of Madame’s doing. Something more subtle. Oh, by the Gods and the Cave, I really didn’t expect anything this soon …’
‘Makr Avehl.’
‘Yes, Ellat.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t go after her. Maybe it’s meant to end as it ended. She isn’t the woman you loved. You admit that.’
He stared at his feet, wondering how he was to tell her, how he was to convince himself. ‘Maybe she isn’t the woman I loved, Ellat. But the woman I loved is still there.’
‘Makr Avehl!’
‘It’s true. I’d stake my soul on it. She’s there. Buried. Unconscious. No. She’s sleeping
, Ellat. Sleeping and dreaming. Peering out at the world from time to time with wide, blinded, forsaken eyes.’
‘You saw?’
‘I saw what I thought was my Marianne. For an instant, only. Inside this other woman, somewhere.’
‘Why? How?’
‘I think she made a trade. Her life for Harvey’s. She couldn’t kill herself, so she just stopped … stopped being. No. Stopped expressing her being. She still is, but she doesn’t give her existence any expression at all. She’s just asleep.’ He sighed deeply, feeling the familiar anguish that he had felt only weeks before when his Marianne had vanished, as suddenly, as cruelly.
‘And even if that weren’t true, even if Marianne is not the woman I loved at all, still she is in this difficulty at least partly because of what I did or didn’t do. In a sense, this is my responsibility.’
‘So you’re going to go after her anyhow, aren’t you?’
He didn’t answer. The expression on his face was answer enough.
… through the door into her living room. It had a tidal smell to it, an abiding moisture, as though the sweats and steams from the laundry below had permeated the intervening walls and floor, making a swamp of these few rooms. Each evening when she climbed the narrow, dank stairs and opened the splintery door she expected to see crabs scurrying away behind the couch or a stand of cattails waving in the kitchen door. She would not have been amazed to find fish swimming in the kitchen sink or leaping in the tub. The greenish under-sea colors of the worn carpet and the walls did nothing to refute this expectation. She was always surprised when she did not float into the place rather than plodding, as now, like an unwilling diver, across the sea floor of living room into a watery cave of kitchen to put the kettle on.
Most of her furniture had been collected from among things left in the laundry over the years. The bed had been found in the big indigo washer one evening after locking up. The green armchair had turned up in a dryer early one morning, though she thought she had checked the machine the night before as she had been told to do. Dishes and cushions appeared frequently, sometimes in the rose machine and sometimes in the green one. Once she had found a roaster and three live chickens in the ivory dryer. She had put the roaster on a high shelf in the kitchen; the three chickens still scratched a meagre living out of the weedy yard behind the laundry, nesting hopefully along the dilapidated board fence. One of them was, or believed itself to be, a rooster and greeted each day with a throaty chuckle that both it and Marianne supposed to be a crow. The cry had more of apologetics than of evangelism about it. On hearing it each morning, Marianne murmured ‘pardon me,’ as though she had been guilty of some egregious incongruity in harboring such an unsuitable chanticleer.
In addition to the more or less salvageable things found in the machines, there were great quantities of miscellany that she could find no use for. These she hauled out, as best she could, into the rear yard near the alley gate, and the trash men picked them up once each week or, for a sizeable tip, fetched the detritus from the laundry itself. She was always afraid that the tips, though accounted for on petty-cash slips and meticulously itemized, would not be considered acceptable expenses and would be deducted from her already tiny paycheck. Surely they could not expect her – or any one person – to carry the quantities of heavy things that the machines disgorged. Why, only two days ago there had been three sets of elephant harness as well as a crated harmonium and three pictures of the palace!
She had hung the pictures among the others in her office. Pictures of the palace or of the royal family almost covered the office walls, repetitive arrangements of the perpendicular: tall, thin members of the ruling family echoing tall, thin columns of the east portico, further paralleled by tall, thin trees on either side. Marianne could not remember seeing the palace personally, though the laundry must surely have been close to it at some time in the past. Still, she kept the pictures. It seemed less disrespectful than throwing them away. Disrespect was punishable, and she supposed she would start hanging them in the laundry itself when the walls of her office were filled.
The office was a mere cubicle in the rear corner of the laundry, a flimsy box of wallboard with one glass window set into it through which she could watch the customers at the machines and two doors, one leading to the back stairway and one into the laundry itself. That one she could shut when the noise became too overpowering, the sound of surf and whirlpool and tide and storm, a rush and surge and shush-shush of waters, a hum and whirl of air.
As one entered from the usually cobbled street one saw the seven huge machines down the left-hand wall, each labeled as to suggested contents, facing the seven matching dryers on the right-hand wall. Ivory washer opposite ivory dryer. Rose machine opposite rose machine. Great, indigo mechanism looming opposite another, equally monstrous. And on the back wall, the small, specialized machines, palest pink and baby blue and sea green, with their tiny soap dispensers tidily arrayed nearby.
In the center of the room was the spotting table and the table for folding clean laundry and half a dozen hard, molded chairs, reliably uncomfortable. The place was busy enough. No point in encouraging people to sit about by making it inviting.
She put the cash box on the kitchen table with a sense of relief, feeling more tired than usual tonight. It had been a sins day, with half the population of Badigor seeking redemption, and Marianne hadn’t had time to sit down since seven this morning. The indigo washer had jammed along about noon, losing at least a dozen citizens in the process. They might show up again, or they might not. With Marianne’s luck, she thought dismally, they’d show up in one of the dryers in the middle of the night and wake her up with their pounding and gargled cries for release.
The apartment looked strange to her, too, as it did sometimes. As though she hadn’t really seen it before, wasn’t familiar with it, didn’t belong in it. As though when she opened the door she should have been somewhere else. Somewhere drier, she thought, closing her eyes and visualizing it. A place where things didn’t rust or mildew immediately. A place with a fireplace and light coming in through the windows instead of this constant, deadly fog. The thought of the fog made her think of being lost, and this brought her alert in a sudden panic.
She hadn’t bought her map for tomorrow!
She stood up, mouth open in an expression of unconscious anxiety, hands twisting together. Usually she bought the map at noon, at a news vendor’s kiosk. There was always a news vendor’s kiosk somewhere within three or four blocks. Today she hadn’t had time to go out to lunch, and she had forgotten it until this moment.
She fought panic by checking her watch, noting that she had at least fifteen minutes before the kiosk would close for the night. If she didn’t get the map there, the nearest place would be the all-night restaurant at the corner of – there, she’d forgotten already. She’d need today’s map in order to find either location.
She grabbed up the map and peered at it as she ran down the stairs, down the aisle between the monstrous, silent machines, their doors agape like snoring mouths, and out the door, stopping under the street light to find the nearest kiosk. There was one, just three blocks away!
She hurried, half running, paying little attention to her surroundings. At one time, she seemed to recall, she had spent hours just walking, entertaining herself with speculation about the strange houses and buildings and with the odd juxtapositions she discovered – infant nursery beside slaughterhouse; twin brothels flanking a church; doctors and apothecaries adjacent to mortuaries; a manufacturer of ear plugs next to a teacher of music. She seemed to remember that she had laughed at these arrangements once, with genuine amusement. No longer. She could not imagine what had made her think them laughable. Humor resulted from surprise, and the combinations she had found were not novel, not even unusual. If she had found them funny, it meant there was something wrong with her, something different, something that didn’t fit in. It was almost as though she had come from some other world in which such neighbor
s were unlikely. This idea had popped into her head unbidden, frightening her badly. The Map Police were known to seek out strangers, people who didn’t fit in. She did not wish to be sought out, so she had stopped looking for weird combinations, stopped noticing the buildings she passed except for ones marking her progress toward her infrequent destinations. It was better just to stick to one’s own obligatory business: a trip to a kiosk once a day to buy a map, a trip to take the laundry receipts to a bank and to shop at a grocery once every ten days, a trip to whatever temple or shrine was nearby on the infrequently declared holidays.
People who used the laundry sometimes talked of keeping in touch with friends or relatives. On holidays, they would meet in a previously agreed upon park. Or they would select a certain restaurant and gather there.
‘I wanted to celebrate Mother’s birthday,’ one woman had said plaintively over her crocheting. ‘But how would anyone know when it was?’
Marianne found herself wondering what a birthday was. Some kind of holiday she didn’t know about. She, herself, had never known anyone well enough to meet them on a holiday. Whenever a holiday was announced, she would make her obligatory trip to the temple or shrine or church and then come back to the apartment over the laundry. She had no relatives. At least, she supposed she had none. Surely she would know if she had, she thought, hurrying along the empty street. It was the kind of thing a person ought to know.
The kiosk was in the middle of the block. The vendor had his back to her and was lowering the shutter as she approached. ‘Tomorrow’s map, please,’ she called, her voice bouncing shrilly between buildings, a dwindling flutter of retreating sound. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late.’
‘So late is too late,’ he grumbled, turning his lumpy face toward her, the eroded skin circling a red, pendulous nose that swayed slightly as he turned. ‘All sold out.’
‘Oh, no!’ she cried. ‘You can’t be.’
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods Page 7