The Ammonite Violin & Others (23 page)

Break the shepherds’ cudgels,

Cast wild fear upon all cattle,

On men, all weeping things
...

There is so very little pain. The pain is unremarkable. And when you are done with me, I lie only a few feet away, silent and curled on my side, watching and wishing I were enough. She flows over you, radiant and insubstantial, dragging at your soul in a tide no different than the way she tugs the oceans to and fro. The water is rising now all about us, and you are drowning because you want not so much as to drown in her glow.

“Who will you hunt tonight?” I ask, my voice hardly more than a hoarse whisper. You do not reply, only smiling now, your lips curling back to show your teeth. “Do you know?” I ask, maybe only asking myself, maybe not asking you at all. “Have you looked into her eyes already?” It is not always a her, not
always.
Only more often than not.

You’re at the window, on your knees and your face upturned to receive her monthly baptism, her precious sacraments of light and gravity. I would follow if I could, if I knew how. If the murmured incantations of Russian witches were enough, then I
would
follow. But I know better, because you have told me, time and time again. Lying together in our bed, you fevered and sweating, hurting, waiting for her to take the suffering away, you have told me how the moon came to your mother when you were only a very small child. The moon came, bearing gifts, and your mother was a lonely woman, starving for the attentions of any lover. A disregarded woman, your mother, and when the moon sang to her and froze her to the bone and laid a wolf pelt at her feet, your mother was smitten.

The moon wears many faces, and for your mother the moon wore the face of a beautiful young mar. “Honor me,” he whis-pered. “Wear this skin and think on me, and always will I love you and watch over you.”

“I was seven,” you’ve said. “I was only seven, and my brother and my sister, they were both much younger. She did not know I watched from the shadows while she stitched the wolf’s pelt to her own skin.”

I cannot say if this is true—if it is
literally
true, if it is a
fact
—or only a metaphor concocted to protect a child, and the man a child became, from the recollection of some more horrible event. Your father was a suicide, you’ve said. The month before the moon came to woo your mother, your father put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. So your mother was all alone and starving for comfort and for affection, starving for the love the moon came peddling like heroin and poisoned sweets, and you say that you have never once blamed her, but I think that’s a lie. In her wolfskin, your mother knew appetites she had never known before, and these were another gift of the moon. She gave you a key and begged and wailed until you locked her in her bedroom, and for days she hide herself away, and you sat listening to the terrible way she moaned, and to her mad laughter, and all the things she said to the moon.

Take it back, she said. Please, please, take it back. Take this hunger away from me.

And you cared for your siblings, as best you could, until the night she broke her bedroom window and slipped over the sill to run on all fours, baying beneath a full harvest moon. Before dawn, she came loping back, and you opened the door when she asked you to, because you were seven and so frightened, and even in the wolfskin, she was still your mother. She murdered your sister first, and then your brother, and you watched. She cut them up with a carving knife and ate until she was sick. And though you were very hungry, when she offered you some choice bit or another, you refused those delicacies.

I lie here on my side and watch you watching the moon. You are your mother’s son, through and through, and it was always only a matter of time, you’ve said, before the moon came for you, too. When I have asked how the story ended, what became of your mother, there is always a different answer, perhaps because that part of the story does not matter, perhaps because it has passed beyond your recall, or it may be, I know, that all these tales are but some fancy of your weary, ravenous mind. She loved us, you say. She loved us and tried to keep us safe. She gave me the key.

And, truth to tell,

She lights up well)

So I, for one, don’t blame her!

On your knees before the altar of the moon, which on this night is all the world. And I have your key on a chain about my neck. Even if you would not let me close those black steel cuffs tight about your wrists tonight, I carry the key always. I lie still, breathing as quietly as I may, and you turn your head and stare down at me with the eyes she has given you, your mother or the moon or the both of them conspiring. Those iridescent, night-seeing eyes, and for a moment I think this will finally be the night you do not love me
enough.
And for a moment, I wish that were the truth.

But then you turn away, and
I
hear, or only imagine that I hear, the staccato dick of sharp claws against the wooden floors, and I’m alone again. I’m waiting again, and I do not care if the moon sees the malice and the anger on my face. I will not hide my resentment for her, and I will not hide my loathing of that grim celestial whore. I will lie here, still and listening closely to the night beyond these thin walls, listening for
you,
my love. And I will track her progress across the wide indigo sky, and when it is time and there is some hint of dawn, I will get up and dress and draw a hot bath so that you will not have to wait when you’ve come home to me again.

Ah, pray make no mistake,

We are not shy;

We’re very wide awake,

The moon and I...

Here,” she said and pointed to a spot just below her sternum, below the cartilaginous tab of her xiphoid process. “It is here. When I swallowed it, this is where it settled. This is where it is.”

There is never any sense that I am falling.

I open my eyes and watch that tortured patch of space, the blue star feeding the blazing accretion disk and the long pale axis of the relativistic jet geysering its stream of electrons and protons and more exotic particles away from the black hole, that stream traveling very near the speed of light.

I have come so far to fall, and now there is no sense at all that I am falling.

In her trailer, she sat alone, for never had she been anything but alone. Not since the night she’d wandered out among the dunes and found whatever it was lying in the sand and had taken it into herself. I now say
whatever it was
, for she would not ever name it herself. But she had placed it upon her tongue, that supermassive lozenge, and allowed it to move down her throat and the corridor of her esophagus, until it found that place where it had seemed most suited.

That is her story. The story she told me.

That is what I recall of her story.

“I was walking in the dunes, and then down onto the shore. At first, I thought it was only some glowing creature left stranded by the tide. I could not say how far it had journeyed to reach me.”

She makes these assumptions
—it had journeyed to reach me
—and I let her, for she is the one who holds it in her chest, not I. She is the vessel, and never was I anything more than a supplicant Five years, and I finally tracked her down a few miles outside Lincoln, Nebraska, living in an old Airstream travel trailer parked out behind a carnival sideshow tent. She’d been with the outfit—part thrill-ride sidestall midway, part Pentecostal revival—for almost six months. I never did learn where she’d been before that. I think they thought that I had come to take her away with me, away from them—the freaks and the swagmen, the roustabouts and the wildeyed young woman who spent her nights speaking in tongues and leading lost lambs back to the loving arms of Jesus. I had not. It would not have mattered if I had, for there is no will in all the world that can overcome the gravity of her.

“They are all very sweet,” she said, meaning the carnival people. “They are all lost.”

“Even the preacher lady?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Her most especially. She is the most lost of them all, poor thing. Sometimes, she comes to talk with me late at night when she thinks no one will know. She sees angels watching her from telephone poles and has terrible dreams about the end of the world.”

I sat on the orange sofa crammed into one end of the Airstream trailer and sipped from the plastic tumbler of warm, flat root beer she’d given me. She talks, and I listen. There is a low shelf crammed with books, and I read the spines while she tells me about the day the show found her, starving and broke and hitchhiking her way across Nevada. Most of the books are hardbacks, almost all of them over my head
—The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time; Principles of Physical Cosmology; Quantum Mechanics and Experience’, The Meaning of Quantum Theory
.;
The Conscious Universe; Mathematical Theory of Black Holes.
And there among all those weighty, intimidating volumes was one familiar face, a battered paperback copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle in Tine.

“Now they think they could not survive without me. They could, of course, just as they survived before I came.” The warm root beer was beginning to taste like Pepto-Bismol, and I sat the tumbler on a folding metal table.

“Put your hand right
here
,” she said, smiling, only that was later, days or hours later. “Can you feel it?”

There is no sense at all that I am falling.

It is not at all what I expected. She promised me that it wouldn’t be. I want to shut my eyes again, but it would not matter. I have seen it now, and shutting my eyes will not ever drive away the memory. I do not
want
to drive the memory away, but it is so much to have seen. It is so much to know.

I pressed my fingers to her chest.

“They come, like you,” she said. “They hear that the show’s rolled into town, and they come just to see, some of them. Or a man might come because all his life he’s felt so empty, all his life he’s felt there’s this terrible knot of emptiness trapped in his belly or behind his eyes. Women have come because they’ve had a baby and felt empty ever since, or because they’ve never been able to conceive. Sometimes, they’ve come because even though they’ve never desired a child, there’s still this vacant place deep inside. But they all come because, one way or another, they feel a terrible emptiness.” The late afternoon sun through the tiny windows of the Airstream was very hot and very bright, and her skin was clammy and slick with sweat.

“Can you feel it?” she asked me, and I could hear excitement in her voice, excitement and a gentle, unselfish sort of pride. “It knows you. It has known you all along.”

But, for all my desire, for all my need, for all my emptiness, all I could feel was her sweat and the tiny, invisible hairs growing there below her small breasts.

“They come,” she said again. “They come from all over. And they all have their different stories to tell. No two ever just exactly alike, same as with snowflakes and fingerprints. But they all have that one thing in common, because, you know, all snowflakes
are
snow-flakes and all fingerprints
are
fingerprints.”

I didn’t tell her why I’d come. My own sob story. The reason for the knot of emptiness chewing me up inside. I never could have told her that, and, mercifully, she didn’t ask, and I thought perhaps she was relieved that I’d kept it to myself.

“It’s a myth,” she said, “that black holes just sit out there gobbling up everything that comes too close. The gravitational field in the proximity of a black hole is no different than the gravitational field produced by any symmetric sphere of the same mass. Objects in space may orbit out beyond the edges of the extent horizon indefinitely.”

“You have to
cross
the event horizon,” I said, and that made her smile again.

“You’ve done your homework.”

“I’ve read a little bit, but nothing like you,” and I nodded towards the bookshelf by the orange sofa, all those intimidating hardbacks and
A Wrinkle in Time
. “Just some of the popular stuff. Stephen Hawking, Clifford Pickover, you know. Books for the lay readers.”

“Have you ever read Kitty Ferguson?” she asked, and I said no, that I hadn’t, that I’d not even heard of her before. And there we sat together, in the hot sunlight, talking about books, my hand still pressed to that spot below her xiphoid process.

“Ah, well,” she said. “No matter. It sounds like you read enough. Much more than most.”

And then I felt it move.

I know the name of this star. I even saw a painting once, an artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 system as a blue supergiant orbiting a black hole. It was a very pretty painting, but it cannot ever compare to what I see, squinting through the forward porthole—the writhing flood of superheated matter flowing out from the young star across however many millions of miles of space to form the black hole’s fiery accretion disk. Eight thousand light-years from Earth, and yet only an hour ago, and hour and a half at most, I was sitting with her in the sweltering aluminum trailer behind the freak tents, sitting there in the stark yellow-white light of a different star.

“For most all of them,” she said, “it is enough just to touch.”

If there had been any sort of a scar, I would have thought it no more than a hoax, that maybe it was nothing but a marble or a ball bearing or possibly some sort of body-piercing implant hidden there beneath her flesh. My fingers began to tingle very faintly, and she took a deep breath and shut her eyes.

“It is not really a
hole
at all,” she said.

And I have no sense that I am falling.

“It’s not enough for
me
,” I told her. “I wish to god it were, but it’s not. I think I must have been looking for you my whole goddamned life.”

And I think that’s when I saw her clearly for the first time. When I saw
her
, instead of merely seeing some object of my desperation, the fruition of my search, the bizarre and garish images painted ten-feet high on the flapping canvas front of the freak show. She was sitting there on a wooden stool, her T-shirt hiked up so I could touch her bare chest, no bra, her nipples brown, each surrounded by a small constellation of freckles. Her hair was the color of hay, her face thin but not severe, her eyes almost the same shade of blue as the star looming outside the porthole. Plain, no one I ever would have thought to call her pretty, and yet I had never seen any woman even half so beautiful. There were freckles below her eyes, speckling her cheekbones. Her lips were thin and chapped.