The Ammonite Violin & Others (2 page)

I wonder how many have died here, how many have lost their way or lingered too long, hypnotized by the siren songs, by her hurricane voice and the booming voice of the ocean echoing off the high granite walls, and then found themselves trapped when the moon dragged the waves back in again. I’ve seen their bones, crusty and sharp with tiny barnacles, green with algae. I’ve seen skulls that have become cradles for anemones and scuttling crabs. Before it’s done, I’ll take my place among them. I know this because she’s told me so again and again. There was a time when that knowledge frightened me. There was a time when I still valued my life more than the sight of her.

I wonder what it will take to get the tub clean.

“I’m growing bored,” you say and sigh and roll over onto your back again. “Are you going to sit there all night or are you going to fuck me?”

He said that as he went down,

Great fishes he did see;

They seemed to think as he did wink,

That he was rather free.

“Soon the stitches will have to come out,” you say and laugh, and I’m not imagining that you’re laughing at me.

“People believed in it, the Fiji mermaid?” I ask.

“People believe what pleases them most. People see what they want to believe. Show them a baby orangutan sewn to a fish’s tail, a little
papier-mâché
, and they’ll see what they
want
to see.”

I close my eyes, shutting out the cold light through the window, and what was that name you used? Jenny Haniver, Jenny Hanvers, Antwerp Anvers,
jeune de Antwerp...

She came at once unto him,

And gave him her white hand,

Saying, “I have waited long, my dear,

To welcome you to land.

Go to your ship and tell them,

You’ll leave them all for me...
”

I don’t remember standing and walking to the bed. I can’t recall standing over you or taking off my dress and my stockings and my boots. Your eyes are black and bottomless, and your teeth are razor shards of alabaster set in purple gums.

... For you’re married to a mermaid

At the bottom of the deep blue sea.

“Yes, that’s my girl,” you murmur, and your breath is no different from the air imprisoned beneath the lighthouse, sea-damp exhalations from the crystalline lips of the cave. “My father was a taxidermist,” you whisper playfully in my ear. “My mother was a shark got caught on his line. They made me from love and needles, from fish heads and silken thread.”

“Maybe they should have thrown you back,” I say, and my fingertips brush quickly across your glistening thighs, then loiter a moment on your pale belly. I touch the smooth place where your navel should be.

“Maybe they did,” you reply.

I am very near the heart of the cave now, moving past twin columns carved and shaped by the constant attentions of the sea, the perfect lancet archway fashioned by nameless architects, its keystone marked by the idiot countenance of some dim, abyssal god. And here is the pool, glowing phosphorescent with the false light of jellyfish and tiny squids, the yellow-green glow of a hundred thousand coelenterate tendrils washed up here and clinging to the rocks. She’s floating facedown in the shallow water just a little ways out from the pool’s nearest edge, her long hair spread wide for a strangling halo, the fins along her spine sagging limp and tattered, and a more careless or indifferent eye might easily mistake her for a dead thing.

I look away from the tub. There are spatters and bloody smears on the floor at my feet, already drying to a crust. There’s more blood waiting in the sink, clinging to the scalpels and Metzenbaum scissors I dropped there when she finally stopped breathing, the retractors and stainless steel hooks and hemostatic forceps. Blood in the tub and on the floor, in the sink and on my hands. All the cleaning to be done, though I’m so tired that I only want to close my eyes and pray she’ll have given my dreams back to me. Certainly, she has no use for them now, for the sea is ever dreaming, that ever slumbering, sunless kingdom of nightmares which lies so many thousands of leagues down, balanced always oil the bright edge of waking.

“Did you actually write that?” you ask me, and I nod yes. You shake your head and frown; your lower lip looks swollen. “Well, it’s wretched,” you tell me. “No wonder no one will publish your silly book. Is that really the best that you can do?”

Later, I’ll admit there’s much more blood than I’d expected. Later, I’ll say something like, “You’d have thought that I’d used a hacksaw and an axe.” I reach for a clean towel to wipe some of it away.

And you impatiently guide my left hand to the cleft between your legs, the skin shaved smooth, and the ocean inside you is beginning to leak out. It moistens my rough fingertips with a few sticky drops of brine, and you’re still talking, describing again for me exactly how it should be done.

“You would tightly bind my legs before making the first incision,” you whisper, as if someone else might overhear. “You would press the blade
here
and draw it slowly down.”

I’m in the cave beneath the lighthouse, and outside, the ocean roars and rages as I wade into the glowing pool. The water is cold enough to steal my breath, and I pause, gasping as it washes about my legs and quickly soaks through my woolen trousers. At that moment, I can almost believe it is a conscious thing, that chill, and that it means to drive me shivering back out onto the rocks. The jealous souls of all those who have come before me to keep her safe and keep her distant and keep her to themselves.

“If I cried out, you would ignore me and keep cutting. It wouldn’t be anything but cowardice, anyway.”

I grit my teeth against the gnawing guardian cold and the pain that comes before merciful numbness and take another step towards her. The bottom of the pool is slick and uneven, and I almost lose my footing, splashing about like a clumsy child, and now the water has risen as high as my waist. If I drown, if I slip again and hypothermia takes me before the water rushes up my nostrils and down my throat and fills my lungs, then I can take my proper place with all the others whom she’s called out from warm beds and the listing decks of sailing ships.

“If I should scream, you’d cut that much deeper,” you whisper urgently, commanding me, and then you thrust your hips against me. And I hold my breath, wanting and dreading what comes next, the part you keep hidden decently inside, the secrets you say you show no one but me.

My father was a taxidermist. My mother was a shark got caught on his line.

I try hard not to look into the tub. There’s nothing there I ever want to see again, nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s only dead flesh, cut away and discarded and unloved.

In the pool, she slaps once at the surface with her broad tail, and the freezing spray peppers my face. She drifts a moment longer, then turns her head and looks at me. Her eyes are something more than empty. Her eyes are the moment before the universe winked on. Her eyes are void and absence and the first twelve seconds after death.

“Don’t you
dare
fucking pussy out on me,” you hiss, digging your sharp nails into my back. And when you enter me, I bite my lip to keep from screaming, bite down hard enough that I taste blood. I’ve never yet seen that hidden part of you; you’ve told me that you’ll kill me if I ever look, and I believe you. It slides deep inside, folding me open, a bristling, stinging fist or fingers sprouting barracuda teeth or a gouging scrimshaw tongue. And now you shut your eyes, your neck bent sharply back so that I can see the old scars on your throat, three ragged pink slits on either side.

They made me from love and needles...

And I’m alone again, curled up in a sandy place near the mouth of the sea cave, though I have never been able to recall how it was that I escaped the pool—if I was found wanting, lacking, and
driven
away, or if I was only too afraid to reach out and take her hand. The moon is bright and bitter above the thundering breakers, no warmth at all from her light as I lie among the weathered stones like Andromeda waiting for the slithering, snake-jawed agent of Poseidon to finally be done with her. I’ll find my way back home before dawn, past the old lighthouse and the marshy banks of the Annisquam River.

You wrap your legs around me. You encircle me.

“Sew them closed,” you murmur, and a single drop of sweat rolls off my chin and lands on your right breast. “Sew them closed forever,” and in that room with its lion-footed tub, I make another careless vow and reach for the leather satchel near the door.

I open my eyes, thinking that it must be morning by now, hoping there
might
be morning in the empty spaces after my dreams, but there’s no less darkness than before, and the air stinks of mildew and old dust, bare concrete and ice. No less darkness than before, but no less light, either. Two naked incandescent bulbs which hang like fairie pears fashioned from glass and tungsten filaments, strung from the high ceiling on yellow electrical cords. And so there is light, and so there are shadows. Some of the shadows move, reminding me I’m not alone. I shut my eyes again, remembering that it can never be morning down here, remembering that and all the stairs leading from the door in the building’s subbasement. We must have walked for an hour, going down. I said to you, “We’ve been walking for a coon’s age,” and you didn’t laugh. You didn’t even stop and look back at me, scowling over your shoulder. You only shrugged and took another step
down.
So, I am remembering the long descent, the cement stairwell and the musty air and the sound of our footsteps, the glow from your flashlight growing dimmer and dimmer as though the darkness above and around and below us had weight like water piled above the deep places of the world, and all that weight was crushing the light back in on itself I’m remembering your anger when I said we should go back.

“There’s always a siren,” she says, “singing you to shipwreck.” And I know that’s only a song I’ve heard somewhere. I know she’s only listening to my memories, so she’s watching as we went down the stairs through the night that will never have a morning, and she has heard me try to call you back. She laughs, and her claws click softly against the concrete.

“Kiss me,” you said, but I knew that wasn’t what you meant. You say kiss me, but you mean another thing entirely, and you show me your white teeth filed down to cannibal points. I always think about how much that must have hurt, and it’s no wonder there’s almost always dried blood caked at the corners of your mouth. Most of it must be your
own.
You said, “Kiss me.” Language only something that’s there to mean what you need it to mean at any given moment, and I put my arms around you tight and let you lap at one of the scabby, always-bruised places at the nape of my neck. But lapping at damage done is never enough, and I know that, and if it had ever mattered I wouldn’t have followed you through the city and down to the basement and the subbasement and down those stairs into the sea. A dentist sharpened your teeth for you, eight incisors and four canines. I used to know his name. He charged you $250 for each tooth and used a drill. “Kiss me,” you said, and I held you as tightly as I dared, because I’m always afraid of drowning, of that water so deep that my feet will never find the bottom, and your sharpened teeth broke through my skin again.

“Why so green and lonely:” she asks me, and I open my eyes again. She’s sitting on the floor near enough that I can see the beads of sweat standing out on her forehead and cheeks and bare chest like beads of milk on her ebony skin. I can see the tiny bones and bits of filth plaited into her hair, and I can see her pupils, a glimmering color that is almost, but not quite, gold. Her pupils like the horizontal bars of a sheep’s eyes, or a squid’s, or... but then she blinks and her eyes are only black.

Take a picture, asshole. It’ll last longer.

Your sharp white teeth digging into my shoulder, and I laid down, your bed too narrow for the both of us, but it’s never stopped you before. That pain so familiar. The pain of kissing you, and in another second or two I was hard and looking for a way inside. “Reciprocal penetration,” you once said. Your teeth, my cock, tit for tat, yin and yang, square pegs and round holes, and I really don’t care. It made you angry when I told you that I didn’t care, but almost everything makes you angry, sooner or later. I should know better than to say anything at all.

“Why so green and lonely?” the thing on the floor in front of me asks again. I spit at it, and it laughs at me.

“That’s just a song I heard on the radio,” I say. “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

Your knees pressing hard against my thighs, and you sink your teeth in deeper. There’s more blood now than you can swallow all at once. You’ll throw these sheets out when we’re done. Sometimes, I think half your paycheck goes for new sheets. But there will still be stains on the mattress. You say you know all those stains by heart. You say you keep them so you won’t forget. Not all of them are mine.

And then I find my way inside, and you’re so wet I can’t help but think about drowning again. Past the hungry red-eyed guardians tattooed on either side of your sex, which you keep shaved or waxed or plucked or, I suspect, whatever hurts the most. Whatever keeps it smooth and bare and keeps those guardian beasts watchful.

“Kiss me,” you say, and blood spills from your lips and dribbles onto my throat. I kiss you the only way I know how, deep as I can go, deep as I’m allowed to go, so deep my feet never touch bottom and deep enough to drown. You smile, your sharp teeth stained crimson, and go back to work on the new hole you’ve made in me.

“You don’t even know where you’re going,” I said, flinching at the way the darkness trapped in the stairwell made my voice so much bigger than it had any right to ever be. “You don’t know where these stairs lead.”

“Turn back if you’re afraid. I never said I couldn’t do this alone.” That part’s true. You never said that you couldn’t do this alone. You never even asked if I’d come with you. I tagged along like a fucking puppy or a younger sibling because I didn’t know what the hell else I was supposed to do. You read a book a man sold you on the internet, a book that was printed in 1906, the same year as the Great San Francisco Earthquake, you said, as if that should mean something to me, as though that might explain why we’re slipping deeper and deeper below the city. No one ever dug anything this deep. I tell you that, and you think I’m making a joke. I’m following you because you’re going, with or without me, and you’re going, because you bought a book from a man on the internet and this is what the book’s told you to do.