The Ammonite Violin & Others (19 page)

“I will not
look
at thee,” the bearded man replies, his voice beginning to quaver. “Thou art accursed, Salome, thou art accursed.” And now she seizes the bearded man by the jaw and forces his head up and back so he’s staring directly into her predatory eyes. “But I
will
kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she tells him. “You will see. I will kiss thy mouth.”

And then the crowd falls silent, and I can feel the simmering expectation lacing that silence like strychnine. The executioner draws his sword, and even through the smoke, the blade glints dully, and I know it’s not a prop, not some toy for pantomimes and passion plays. The Lady Salome releases her grip on the prophet’s jaw, then turns and ascends the low stage and takes her place upon the golden throne. The silence has grown so heavy, it will soon crush me flat, I think, and I wish I were still lying unconscious and unknowing on the autumn carpet, or that my fox boy and I were still curled together in my fold-away bed, safe and warm beneath clean flannel sheets and goose-down comforters.

Look away,
I hear my fox boy say, my rusty October scarecrow cooped up inside my aching skull with all the wasps and honey bees. But I’m not so far gone I don’t know it’s only
me
speaking to
me,
because he would
never have
me look away. He would have me see it
all
, would have me stare into the abyss until I am blind and can see no more, and still he would not have me look away.

The executioner—whose name I have already forgotten—raises his sword, and surely this is as tar as it goes. Surely, this is where it
ends
, and in a moment there will be gales of laughter, fucking
hurricanes
of laughter, and I will feel so foolish at the way my heart has begun to race and the cold sweat beading on my palms.

The sword comes down, cleanly dividing the bearded man’s head from his shoulders. He does not scream or cry out, does not make any sound at all that I can detect. Blood sprays from the stump of his neck, catching the executioner and Old Man Crow, though neither of them so much as flinch. His body sinks slowly to the floor; it seems to take a very longtime for it to fall, and already Old Man Crow has retrieved the head and is placing it on a silver serving tray just like the ones the bulldogs have been using for martinis and cosmos and shots of tequila.

And I cannot look away. To save my life, I could not look away.

“Now, give me the head of Jokanaan!” says the Lady Salome. And Old Man Crow, smug and bloodstained beneath purple robes and the sun fastened to his brow, offers up the severed head of the prophet to the temptress on her throne. She lifts the skull by its scraggly hair and holds it high so all may see her prize. Blood pools in her lap and streams down her long legs.

“Well,” she says, “I know that thou
wouldst
have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death.”

And I feel hands upon my shoulders, smooth and soothing hands, hands that might yet deliver me from this nightmare, but I cannot look away.

“Ah,” sighs Salome. “Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well, I
will
kiss it now. I will
bite
it with my teeth as one bites ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss
thy
mouth, Jokanaan,” and then she does, pressing her lips to the lips of the dead man.

And where only a moment before, the room was filled with masked faces, it is occupied now with the snarling muzzles and snouts of things which have
never
been men and never shall be men, with lolling tongues and sharp white canines snapping viciously at the smoky air. And I feel my fox boy’s paws resting there upon my shoulders, and he whispers the way a fox would whisper, “So you see,
kitsune
? Not like Mardi Gras at all. It is only like itself.”

“Yes,” I reply, wishing he would cover my eyes so I would no longer have to watch as the Lady Salome finishes her kiss and begins to feed.

“I should not have left you here alone,” my fox boy says. “That was not very kind of me.”

“What happens next?” I ask him and realize that I am crying. “What do we do now?”

“Oh, that’s the easy part,” he replies. “Now we only have to take our places and join the dance.” And a minute or two later, he steps around to the front of the cranberry-red sofa, my beautiful, beautiful fox boy in his Marie Antoinette gown, and I see that there is hardly any boy left of him now. Maybe there was never very much to begin with.

“You
can
dance, can’t you?” he asks, and then he curtsies and winks and leads me down to the feast.

Somewhere out beyond this world which is only the rotating cages of steel and glass, the Barker’s voice rises like a siren melody, luring in the hungry and unwary, singing a million wandering ships towards hidden reefs and jagged headlands. Two bits! he calls down from his high place in the spotlight glare. Just two measly bits, and we’ll rip your hulls wide and drown you in the cold and briny deep, but never fora moment will you regret it, Sir or Madam. Never will you die unfulfilled. You’ll thank us, yes you will, and ask for more. Just two bits and your immortal soul and whatever flesh you can or cannot spare—a small price to pay, a king’s ransom, a steal, a bargain at thrice that amount.

And here I sit at the center of the wheel, the sparkling hub, the wheel within the wheel, sitting upright, never slumping on my stool, with his melodic naiad voice raining down upon me. But he did not sing me here; I would be here with or without his dulcet charms. I did not need the carnival’s gaudy handbills, posters, and broadsheets to show me the way. I did not need enticements and main-street parades. My own bed of my own making, so leave me to it. Leave me here alone at the heart of the Barker’s wheel. Do not even speak my name, for I will not look away. Not even for an instant. He has tried that trick so many times now, but I will not ever look away. This fantastic contraption built only for me—my desire’s optic cradle—a hundred eyepieces positioned
just so
that I might simply lean forward and peer though, catching the precious light off roof and Porro prisms, images bounced with rare precision along the brass tubes of a dozen spy glasses. All these windows laced together with wooden struts and glue, steel rods and spot welds, thoughtful hand cranks placed
here
and
here
and
here
that I may easily reposition this or that portal to suit my momentary needs.

If there were ever a life lived outside this cell, a
before
, then it has passed far beyond the hinterlands of my memory. And I do not go looking for it. I hare been always otherwise occupied. Always it seems, and so long has been my residency that I am become a standard, the old familiar beating heart of this sideshow. I have my own place on the painted canvas flaps, and men and women and children hand over their quarters and dollars and pennies for a glimpse of me, when all I ever do myself is glimpse.

Gaze upon him, Gentlemen and Ladies, this wretch so driven by appetite and lust tint he might never linger very long at any delight, no matter how exquisite, for fear of what he might be missing elsewhere. Satisfaction, you ask? He’s never heard the word. It isn’t what he sees before him—though the beauty of it, the wonder and the horror and the glamour, might appease any one among you for all eternity—but what he
may yet see,
that nameless, unnamable sight which might await him. Do you begin to guess his affliction, he who stares so long and hard, but somehow never sees? Do not name it greed. That would be too gentle, love.

With this red switch
here,
I cause the wheel to advance, cell by cell, frame by frame, and with this green switch
here
I halt that advance until I am quite ready for it to begin anew. My bare feet rest upon an hourglass filled with sand from all the deserts of the world (or so the Barker says), and so I must surely appear like some absurd reject from a Tarot deck. The grains fall one by one, at the precise instant I flip the red switch, so ingenious is the contraption. Clever men build clever toys. The Barker tells the crowd the glass holds a million million grains. You do the math, he likes to say I flip the red switch.

And unseen machineries are set once more in motion—the spiral dance of spur gears and helical gears, cogs and shafts, rack and pinion clockworks, pulleys and ropes woven from the strongest hemp.

And the wheel turns.

Or I turn within the wheel. It hardly matters which.

The wheel or the hub, rolling ahead one space, and I squint through my favourite spyglass or set of antique opera glasses, waiting with sweaty palms and trembling hands as one scene is duly replaced by another. I have no doubt but that the delicious, bright anticipation
will
kill me, sooner or later, the anticipation like acid scalding my veins. And the whole wheel shudders, those great iron spokes groaning beneath the weight of their burden, and there is a distinct
click
somewhere in the mechanism as a new cell fills the space vacated by its predecessor. I flip the green switch, and somewhere above me in lofty sawdust balconies the crowd gasps, and the calliope falls silent, and the Barker waits for my reaction to this newest vision.

—-The girl lies at the edge of the sea. She is not a mermaid, not yet, but this very morning she has come upon the oily carcass of a tiger shark, nine feet snout to tail, stranded in the seaweed and sand and shell litter. All she has ever wanted, this girl, a strong heterocercal tail, pectoral and anal and pelvic fins to carry her down into abyssal gloom that she might finally take her place in Neptune’s lightless halls. She’s hacked away the head and jaws a few inches above the gill slits and buries it in the dunes. Then she returns to the shark and slips herself inside, wriggling unwanted legs deep into the slimy, decaying gullet of the monster fish, burying herself to the hips. And with an upholstery needle and fine silk thread she begins to stitch herself to the dead shark, sewing her own pale, insufficient flesh to its sturdy predator’s trunk. Later, she knows there will be some spark of magic, a marvelous alchemy of flesh and bone and cartilage to finish up the job,
if
she is strong and her will does not falter and she does not allow the pain to stay her hand. There will be a fusion, at the last, and answered prayers, and her pelagic longing alone will be enough to complete what she has begun. The sand all around her is spattered and splotched and stained with gore, and there’s no telling which blood is her own and which belonged to the tiger shark. Hungry gulls and ravens wheel impatiently overhead, and the wind whispers secrets through green tangles of beach roses. She understands that she has to work fast, though the heat of the sun and the stink is making her ill, making her weak, slowing her down. She has to work fast, because the tide is coming in, lapping at that tail that is not yet hers...

Click.

And the wheel turns. For me, the wheel turns, again.

—Here now I see a dim and dingy room, unfurnished, three walls of bare concrete, and a young man kneels on the floor, or has fallen to his knees. I cannot tell which, and it does not necessarily matter. He wears nothing but a cloth blindfold, and his wrists are bound tightly behind his back. His head is bowed. Something immense squats over him, something glistening black as midnight, skin that may as well be leather or slick latex. It balances its bulk on long and jointed stilt legs. It purrs and sighs and sings the young man a breathless, toneless symphony of torture and transformation, of perdition and deliverance. I understand at once that he is not a prisoner. He is a willing supplicant, as this night-skinned thing would never come to a mere prisoner. It is a gourmand, this creature, and it does not come when called.

“Mother,” he whispers. “Am I not purer Have you not summoned me, and have I not answered the summoning?” The thing makes a comforting, keening sound, and now I see that the young man kneels within a wide ring of some white powder.

“I have waited so long,” he says. “I have been faithful, and never has another touched me.”

Hearing that, the black thing stops crooning and stands there above him, swaying almost imperceptibly on those long insectile legs. I quickly adjust the fine focus on a pair of Swarovski binoculars, pushing the insufficient opera glasses aside, and now I can plainly see the huge blisters on the creature’s distended underbelly. The young man raises his head, looking up as though he can see through the blindfold and would now behold the sight of it, the sight of
her.
And then the blisters rupture, popping one after another, spraying him with foul corruption, the ichor of old and unimaginable infections. There is an expression of release and perfect elation on his upturned face, the face of a man standing at the gates of the only Heaven he has ever imagined.

Something the colour of a fresh burn slips from a slit set high on the creatures body, a proboscis or appendage of similar utility, perhaps, and it slithers and winds itself about the supplicant’s torso, blindly feeling its way along the contours of his back, lingering at the base of his spine, and then sliding suddenly inside his ass. He moans and mutters obscene adjurations while the night-skinned thing fills him with its seed or eggs or something else that I cannot even begin to comprehend. I reach for the red switch.

Click.

And the cages roll, ferrying the scene away.

Above me, the Barker cackles through his megaphone.

Behold this Peeping Tom, this onlooker, starving though such a sumptuous banquet is laid out before him! Visions of such awful and exquisite ecstasy that even old Narcissus would be distracted from the reflection gazing back up at him from that still Thespian pool. But these spectacles we so thoughtfully provide are
not
enough, dear hearts. And why is this, might you inquire, being as you are of inquisitorial and meddlesome dispositions? Well, alas, I can only conjecture. But one must begin to suspect a certain peculiar emptiness in him, a hole or cavity, some spiritual cavern of such profound dimensions that it may never be filled up. He can not see
enough.
In all the wide universe, there are not sights sufficient to his unending need. Pity him, friends. And
see...