The Ammonite Violin & Others (20 page)

The wheels turn, and I work the nearest hand crank, trading in one set of binoculars for a different pair. Below my feet, a single grain of sand falls, a single grain plucked from the Sahara or the Kalahari, the Karakum or Australia’s Western Desert.

I do not feel their eyes on me.

I do not hear his booming voice.

—The stockade, a muddy pen enclosed by rough wooden posts and rails and a rusty metal gate held loosely shut with a twisted length of barbed wire. Mud the colour of shit, and the swineherd stands there in his tall rubber boots, a leather whip clenched in one fist. There are two or three others sitting on the rails, watching and shod with muddy rubbers of their own. In the pen, there are seven... animals... down on hands and knees, rooting about in the mud and filth. They might have been men and women once, long ago. There are still vestiges of that former humanity in evidence, of the lives lived and lost. They still have
faces.
Otherwise, there would be no reason to watch. This is the uttermost debasement of humanity, perhaps. I hold that thought a moment, and then push it aside. No, this must be only the
beginning,
and disgrace and humiliation beyond my stunted ability to apprehend still awaits.

The swineherd curses and strikes one of the animals—which I know was once a very beautiful woman—lashing it across the buttocks
with
his whip. It squeals in pain and anger, and there might almost be the ruin of words in there somewhere, as well. It rises up on hind legs amputated neatly below the knees, kicking out at the man with forelegs amputated just as neatly below the elbows. It snarls at the swineherd, bearing incisors and the short tusks protruding from is malformed lips. It has six flaccid breasts, and I wonder how many litters of piglets and not-quite-piglets have pawed and suckled at those teats.

“Yeah, that’s her,” one of the men sitting on the fence calls out to the swineherd. “That’s the sow bitch bit me, right there.”

The swineherd grins and hits the beast again, harder than before. “Is that it, piggy? You like to bite? You gone and got a taste for blood?”

She grunts and falls clumsily back into the mud, but only a moment later, two of the men from the fence have jumped down and seized hold of her short rear legs, and together they drag her towards the rusty gate. The swineherd is opening it, unknotting the barbed wire, and the gate creaks loud on corroded hinges. I know what’s coming next, and I could linger here. I could see it through. The jute cords cinched quick around her stubby back legs before they strain and hoist her to hang head down above a galvanized aluminum washtub. Metal stained and scabbed from all the butcheries that have come before, and I could watch while she dangles there and squeals and screams like the woman she used to be, until the swineherd draws his blade across her throat—

I flip the red switch again.

The contraption bears the scene away, and I turn to the eyepiece of a spyglass I’ve been told was found amongst the effects of a certain Caribbean pirate. But that’s one of the Barker’s tales, so this instrument might have come from anywhere, anywhere at all.

Another grain of sand.

With thumb and index finger, I flip the green switch.

—And now there is a garden before me, a pretend rainforest dripping beneath wrought iron and greenhouse glass, stolen and patched back together from bits of Amazonia and the Congo and the jungles of Indonesia. There are long tables and workbenches, spades and empty terra-cotta pots and bulging bags of topsoil and fertilizer. Steam rises from thick clumps of philodendrons and scouring rushes and a hundred varieties of plants I do not know names for. The fleshy, drooping blossoms of the most exotic orchids, the sticky lures of bizarre carnivorous dicots, and here and there are primordial cycads and the trunks of tree ferns imported from New Zealand. For all I know, time may have begun here, in this garden, and I would not be surprised to see gigantic lizards watching from magnolia limbs or to hear the heavy air shattered by the shrieks of pterodactyls. There are two women—one older, the other somewhat younger, but both uncommonly handsome. The older woman’s hair has begun to fade from black to grey, and her companion’s hair is a shade that reminds me of crushed pecan shells.

They’re sitting together on one of the benches. Neither is dressed, and their skin seems almost to glow in the warm sunlight sifting down through the arboretum glass. A fountain gurgles somewhere nearby, splashing droplets of fresh, clean water on the dark slate flagstones that pave the garden path. Between the two women there is a small parcel resting on the bench, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with twine. Something they have waited many years to receive, no doubt, some botanical rarity to at last complete their nursery, and the older woman snips the twine with a pair of shears.

“You are sure?” she asks her companion.

“Yes,” the younger woman replies—too eagerly, too truthfully—and smiles, and then they kiss, there beneath those antediluvian fronds and epiphytic canopies. It is a long and hard and somehow desperate kiss, drawing from deep passion that might well be as ancient as all the forests of the world. There is tenderness here, and devotion, and love I cannot fathom, and I reach for the red switch.

But I have not yet seen the contents of the parcel.

And so my hand hovers, indecisive, above the control panel. Far above, the Barker chuckles and his audience holds its collective breath.

“You
have
to be sure,” the older woman says, and this time her lover merely nods for a reply and opens the parcel. Just a simple cardboard box beneath the paper, but she reaches inside and produces a glass vial, corked and filled with an emerald liquid that sparkles in the sun. And there is a small manila envelope, as well, and she opens it and shakes out a number of pea-sized seeds into the older woman’s outstretched palm. The very last thing from the box is something wrapped in cellophane, which she unwraps, and I see it’s a small wad of clayey black earth.

I touch the switch, quickly losing interest, and I can feel the Barker, urging me on, taunting me with no words at all, only the steely glint of those eyes I have never seen and never shall see.

The younger woman is lying naked on the damp flagstones now, her legs spread wide to reveal the hidden cleft of her sex, and the older woman bends down over her. In her right hand, she holds the seeds, and in her left, the glass vial, which she has unstoppered. She whispers a few lines of poetry which I can clearly hear, passages in dactylic hexameter that might be Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and might be something else altogether. And now her lover closes her eyes and lies very still while the older woman empties the contents of the green vial into her companion’s vagina. Next, most of the seeds are carefully placed within warm labial and cervical folds; the last two are tucked in snugly beneath the clitoral hood.

From my seat at the hub and through my lenses I can see it all, the finest details of that secret anatomy, the busy planting fingers, the expression on the older woman’s face that might almost be sorrow and regret and whatever comes before the fact of a loss. I can see it all. For the moment, I have forgotten the red switch and what it signifies. I have forgotten, too, the Barker and his crowd and the dazzling spotlight halo.

The older woman kneads black clay between her callused fingers, then uses it to seal her lover shut.

“How long?” the younger woman asks, opening her eyes and staring up into tropical boughs and sunlight and the intricate framework of glass and steel.

“Soon now,” the older woman replies, sitting down on the stones beside her. But I can see that it has already started,
this
metamorphosis; the younger woman’s pubic hair has become a mossy thatch, and the yellow-green shoot that was so recently only her clit is pushing its way up through the clay plug.

I flip the red switch.

The Barker roars like a typhoon of fire and freezing wind, and another grain of sand falls beneath my feet.

Click.

Too much sentiment? the Barker howls, a question tumbling from the storm overhead, and then another on its heels. Too much inconvenient
feeling
getting in the way, when all he wants is raw, insensate exhibition? Look ye upon this poor, poor fellow. How he rushes ahead, pell-mell. How he grinds his teeth and anticipates and grows dizzy from his endless, irresolvable erection. Will he burst ere much longer, or are his balls, so long denied, gone dry and shriveled as the mummified testicles of an Egyptian pharaoh?

I flip the green switch.

—A boy stands before a tall looking glass, but for a moment I am too distracted by my
own
reflection there to notice anything else, just my face staring back at me through the pirates’ telescope. So I reach for one of the cranks and quickly switch again to binoculars and a different angle, a different perspective. And yes, a boy standing before a looking glass—he cannot yet be twenty, maybe nineteen. His dick is hard, and he holds it firmly in his right hand. He has shaved his legs and wears black stiletto pumps and black silk stockings held up with a matching lace garter belt. His belly is flat and hard, but not so muscular that it spoils the illusion. He’s spent almost a whole hour on his face and imagines his own scarlet lips closing tightly around the shaft of his swollen penis. He has never once seen any girl even half so lovely as himself, and never has he desired any man, either. He has made love to both, of course, but always those couplings have left him disappointed and confused. He is often haunted by phone calls and letters from discarded paramours, the ones who want more and cannot understand his disinterest.

If only I had a twin,
he has frequently thought.
If only I had an identical twin, we would never have need of mother.
Indeed, there have been times when he entertained fantasies of twins born and lost, born and hidden, born and then taken from him at birth. And one day they might meet by some unlikely happenstance. Someday, he might glance across a bustling street or the dining room of a crowded restaurant and see his own green eyes gazing back at him.

The irony is not lost on me. It never is.

I can
hear
the Barker’s grin, and then the air around me and my contraption and my stool and the sand-filled hourglass beneath my bare feet trembles at his words.

If what he sees here displeases him, the Barker explains, if the wheel bears forth some perversity too distasteful or not at all to his liking, why, he’s always free to move along. If he cannot bear the sight of a thing—if, perchance, it strikes too close to home or rings too true—he knows the drill. I would have it no other way, as so refined a palate must never be forced to tolerate that which has been poorly prepared or presented.

The boy in the mirror admires his hairless chest, his polished nails, his high cheekbones. If he only had a twin—

And I flip the switch.

The machine does as I’ve asked, and the wheel spins, or it’s only me that spins, and the pretty, preening boy and his looking glass are immediately swept from view.

And I would turn away, would finally shut my eyes and find merciful darkness there to ease this relentless pounding in my chest. My mouth is drier than the hourglass sands, and it’s been that dry as long as I can remember, not the meanest drop of spit left between my chapped lips and parched tongue. Oh, there is water, if I want it. There is a tall glass of crystal water always within easy reach. But there is no
time
to drink, and there is no time to turn away. There is only the carnival’s contraption radiating all around me as it does, and these endless windows which are its hollow promises. There is only the ache between my legs and the constant craving...

One grain of sand falls, a descent that seems to go on for hours while the Barker roars and rages and the calliope wails. I hear autumn wind ruffling at the gaff banners and smell candy apples and popcorn and spilled beer. I smell the horses and the elephants. In this instant, I would gladly trade places with some simpler carny freak—Tom Thumb or the bearded lady, the Siamese Twins or the pinhead or that albino knot of stillborn flesh floating blind in its jar of spirits. I might be only something which is
seen
, only another sideshow geek or fakir, a tattooed fire eater or sword swallower selling Bibles and signed photos to the marks and mooches and lot lice.

Click.

I dutifully press the green switch with my thumb, and all thoughts of escape or compromise are immediately lost to me. For here is something
else
that I have never seen or even imagined, something I
must
see, for one day or night there will finally be that scene that will pacify and satiate my gluttonous hunger. They call it
faith,
to believe such things.

The Barker is pleased. I still hear his grin, but it no longer
hurts
to hear. It no longer grates like braking locomotive wheels grinding rails. His grin no longer throws molten sparks.

—A woman sits nude at the center of an empty room that has been painted the colour of a ripe pomegranate—walls, ceiling, doors, window casings, and the floor. The paint is still wet, and she sits on the last remaining unpainted patch of hardwood floor, her legs pulled up close to her chest, her arms tight around her knees. There is a terrible scar on her face, a keloid slash that might be the legacy of a burn or a knife or a razor or the jaws of a wild beast. I could not tell you which. Before the scar, she might have been pleasing to the eye, but somehow I sense that the real mutilation here is not so superficial. Something’s torn apart
inside
her, something ripped asunder, some private, lonely wound.

Nothing she does not deserve, she would say, if I could ask. Nothing I didn’t have coming to me after what I did. Her thoughts are the same shade of red as the drying paint.

There are two open buckets beside her, one empty and the other half full. There’s a pool of paint inside a metal tray, and a brush, and a roller. She touches a fingertip to the damp pomegranate floor and stares a while at the stain this contact leaves on her flesh. And then she takes the roller from its tray and begins on her legs and thighs...