The Ammonite Violin & Others (27 page)

She jerks awake from a dream that is not the endless staircase, and not the agate sea with her balanced precariously there above it, and not the whiplash trees, and not
The Curve of the Esplanade.
Acacia looks at the old wind-up clock on the table beside her bed and sees that she’s only been asleep for seven minutes. It only seemed like a week or seven days, that mean time-stretching trick of dreams. She blinks, wipes a bit of spittle from her lips, then notes the hour and minute on a dated index card lying next to the clock. She does not note the particular dream.

She sits up and stares across the room at the dark window. She will not have draperies, as they have always seemed like an attempt to hide something or an attempt to hide
from
something, and she will do neither. From her bed, Acacia watches the night, first the broad star-dappled sky and then the brick building across the way. It seems, often, she is being asked to make a choice between them, and so each must represent something quite distinct from the other. The calculated order of one aging brick and mortar wall, versus the chaos of all the universe; unless, instead, it’s the choice between a comforting barricade that she may only see just so far, and no farther, or a view that extends all the way back to the very beginning of time. She has by now considered a wide assortment of possible representations and the many choices that would follow from them. She has discussed it, on several occasions, with the psychiatrist—the problem of the night sky and the brick wall—but as always his conclusions strike her as hardly more than recited estimates meant to confine and comfort and dismiss.

Acacia switches on the lamp beside the bed, and the window across the room is rendered almost opaque in the incandescent flood. It’s better that way. She knows that there are problems that do not present themselves in order to be solved, but, rather, to be appreciated, to disclose perspective or humility or awe. The wooden headboard is cool against her back, and she thinks how good it would be to get dressed and go out to the almost-empty midnight streets. But it’s a bad neighborhood, as she has been reminded repeatedly, and no fit place for the long walks that might begin to ease her insomnia. The wee hours in the city are for wolves and worse things than wolves, just as the psychiatrist’s office is for the teasing paws of cats that slowly grow bored. So, she has the window, the brick wall, and the sky. So, she has her dreams, which she would never have again if she might discover the secret of their exile. And she has the prescription bottle of pills she will not take, because if seven minutes seems but a week, how long might seven hours be?

Acacia pushes back the sweaty sheets and sees the blister on her left thigh, grown almost a big as a dime. At first, she thinks that something must have bitten her while she slept—a poisonous spider, maybe, or some species of fly. The blister, or boil, or pustule, is as black as the night waiting outside her bedroom window. She touches it, and there is no pain. It doesn’t itch. The skin around it seems mildly inflamed, but there’s no numbness nor any other sort of discomfort. In the lamplight, it glistens like a gemstone, a carbuncle of polished onyx or hematite, or an enormous pearl. It doesn’t scare her, though she is aware that it probably should. She is also aware that she should get up and go to the bathroom to put something on it. A dab of antibacterial ointment, perhaps, or the spray she keeps on hand for mosquito bites. Instead, she sits in bed and stares at it while the wind-up clock ticks loudly on the table. Now and then, she presses the pad of a thumb or index finger against the ebony swelling; it feels almost as solid as stone. After a while, Acacia switches the lamp off again and watches the sky and the brick wall until sleep catches up with her once more.

This is not a dream she’s ever dreamed. Or if it is, it’s one she has entirely forgotten. She stands alone at the edge of the sea, and the full moon has just begun to rise above the horizon, a jaundiced eye opening with exquisite slowness to gaze across the waves to the place where she stands on the night-swaddled sand. Behind her, there is the whisper of sea oats rustling in the salty breeze, and the waves murmur and hiss at her feet. They rush forward and then withdraw, as they have done since the first sea washed against the volcanic shores of the first continents. She watches the moon, and the moon watches her. A falling star streaks across the sky, and she thinks that never before has she seen one even half that bright. It leaves an afterimage when she blinks. Acacia sits down on the damp sand, because she must have walked a long way to reach the sea, which is nowhere near the city where she lives. She is not tired, but it’s probably best if she behaves as though she were, lest the moon grow more suspicious than it already appears to be. There is a woman sitting beside her on the beach, and the woman is talking, so Acacia listens and realizes that the woman is speaking to her.

“You must be wearying of this,” the woman says. “Surely, you must be sick to death of it all.”

“I had not noticed,” Acacia replies, then wonders if she’s telling the truth, or if maybe the necessary games she plays with the psychiatrist and those other few people she ever has cause to speak with have led her to forget precisely how that’s done.

“It smells like thunder,” the woman tells her. “This sort of exhaustion. Have you never noticed, how they smell the same?”

“No, I never have noticed.”

Then neither of them says anything else for a long moment or two while the sea comes and goes, while the moon watches warily on, while the stalks of sea oats rub dryly, one against the other. Acacia pushes her fingers into the sand and pulls them back out, embedding quartz granules and flecks of mica deep beneath her short nails.

“You cannot now remember why or how or when this started,” the woman says. “You have waited too long, I think. Sometimes it happens that way.”

Her words seem like a puzzle to Acacia, or a choice not so different from that between the sky outside her bedroom window and the brick wall. Not a puzzle to be solved, but only to be regarded.

The moon has risen above the restless plain of the sea and bleeds reflected light.

“It has been so very long,” the woman says, “that you don’t want to believe you ever knew. It’s easier to think you never understood even the least part of it.”

“Are you calling me a coward?”

“I am not calling you a coward. I am telling you something you won’t hear otherwise, not unless I say the words.”

And when Acacia wakes again, almost half an hour has passed, and the blister has grown as large as a ripe plum.

She is standing at the bathroom sink, staring back at her reflection in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. Her hair is the color of straw and her lips are the pink of fresh salmon. Her eyes are the same cornflower blue they’ve always been, her naked body almost as pale as milk but for the spray of freckles on her cheeks and shoulders, the straw thatch of pubic hair, her nipples. The swelling on her thigh is the deepest black she has ever imagined, awaking or asleep. She is not frightened, and neither is she in pain. Rut her hands are shaking, and there are beads of sweat standing out on her forehead and upper lip. There is adrenaline and a taste at the back of her mouth like rust.

“What is it I’ve forgotten?” she asks herself, and in the mirror, her lips move in perfect pantomime. She covers the swelling with her right palm, so that the girl in the glass is only herself again. Only Acacia running from sleep and refusing to choose. The blister is not feverish, though it seems to her it ought to be. It also isn’t hard, the way it was before she slept another thirty minutes and dreamt of the woman on the beach. Now it has gone quite soft, and yields to her touch.

“Would you force me to remember?” she asks the mirror, and uncovers the swelling again. “Is that what this is? Because I won’t decide, the decision is going to be made
for
me?” And Acacia leans on the edge of the sink, not wanting to see her face, and not wanting to see the black thing sprouting from her flesh. And it occurs to her that she might not be frightened, but she is angry, more angry than she can ever recall having been before, and she opens the medicine cabinet and rummages about on the crowded metal shelves until she finds something suitable, a pair of stainless-steel tweezers hiding beneath a box of Band-Aids and a tube of neomycin. She closes the medicine-cabinet door and glares back at the girl with blue eyes and straw-colored hair.

“If I can’t remember, there must be a good reason why,” she says, herself or her reflection of the both of them speaking in unison. “And whatever it might be, I have a right to have forgotten. I have a right to not look back, to not recollect.”

... if I followed one of them, in one direction or the other, someday I might return to the place where I began.

How would you know? How would you know, when you’d returned to the point where you started?

I might break off a bit on my shadow
...

Acacia forces the tips of the tweezers together, then she and the girl on the other side of the medicine-cabinet door press the steel into the swelling on her thigh. And what spills out, it’s warm, and it takes away the anger. And it smells more like thunder than anything else ever has. What was trapped inside, unremembered, now flows eagerly down her leg and also up across the very slight bulge of her belly. It does not spurt or drip or spatter to the ceramic tiles. When it slides between her legs and slips inside her, Acacia gasps, and the tweezers slip from her fingers and take a very long time to clatter to the floor.

... and use that to draw the mark.

She grips the edges of the sink with both hands so she won’t fall, and she does not cry out, and she does not look away. It moves so quickly, possessed of a certainty of purpose that she has never known, or simply cannot remember ever having known. It spreads itself across her like a second epidermis, the thinnest coat of blackest paint, and it shimmers wetly in the light above the medicine cabinet. The stain only pauses when it has risen as high as her chin line, where it lingers, as if enough of that hideous urgency has been spent that it may now require permission or consent before proceeding any farther.

Acacia parts her lips, her thin salmon lips, and a drop of sweat rolls down her face to burst upon her tongue. In the mirror, her eyes have grown so wide, seeing so much all at once, so much she had imperfectly forgotten and meant never to remember. She turns loose of the sink and takes a single step backwards, and her legs feel strong and sure of themselves. The hole in her thigh has already begun to close, and when her black fingers brush the oily pool of her navel, ripples spread out across her body.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks the girl in the mirror, the gleaming black pearl, only asking herself and no one else. And in a fraction of another second, it is finished, and she stands on the impossibly steep white marble stairs leading down and leading up and away on either side. And it is the easiest thing she has ever had to do, taking that first, next step.

In the long gallery decorated with pastoral depictions of carnage wrought by Cretaceous saurians preying one upon the other, the blind geologist sits with the girl named Mary. It is quite a small museum, built near the sea; indeed, its easternmost wall borders on the Old Mooring Road and so runs down almost to the quayside. By now, the sun has drifted below the western horizon, and the hoarse, wheeling gulls have fallen silent; the museum is locked up tight until the morning. At this hour, it might well be a tomb, laid aside for the world’s most primeval burials, a mausoleum for vanished creations and bygone leviathans. The two women sit together on a granite bench amid the hulking shapes of tall glass cases and petrified skeletons patched together with plaster of Paris and held upright with welded iron armatures, and the murals and their faces are illumined in gently flickering gaslight. Though blind, the geologist wears pince-nez spectacles tinted an iridescent blue, an oily sort of blue that, in a certain light, appears almost green, shifting across the visible spectrum like the shell of a beetle or the buzzing wings of a dragonfly. She would have no one look upon the milky cataracts that scar her ruined eyes, and there is some minute comfort in having the finger-piece lenses perched there upon the bridge of her nose, set between herself and the gaping, curious scrutiny of men.

The girl sighs and shifts about on the bench—restless, impatient—and the silk taffeta of her skirts rustles softly.

“Is something the matter?” the geologist asks her.

“It’s like they’re watching us,” the girl replies. “Those awful eyes up there, always waiting to pounce. It’s a horrible thing to put upon on a wall, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” says the geologist. “At least, I don’t presently recollect ever having done so.”

“Well, it’s horrible all the same.”

“
Are God and Nature then at strife. That Nature lends such evil dreams?”
the geologist recites, then licks her chapped, dry lips. “What’s that? Is that scripture?”

“No, Mary That’s Tennyson. ‘In Memorium A.H.H.’”

“A poem?” the girl asks skeptically, and the geologist slowly nods her head. “Well, I never heard it before, and it doesn’t make me dislike those horrid things any less.”

When the murals were painted, almost fifteen years before, the geologist was a young woman and still had the use of her eyes. They were still blue then, like the maritime skies, and she sat beneath the scaffolding and watched as the artist resurrected the
Lælaps
and
Hadrosaurus
, the toothsome pair of sea-faring mosasaurs, the
Iguanodon
of Bernissart and the
Megalosaurus
of Stonesfield Village. Ancient scenes from both the Old World and New England, recreated by the handsome landscape painter from Manhattan, following her careful notes and sketches and spoken directions. All his countless pigments hand-ground with mortar and pestle, and she looked on as he mixed the bright powders with egg yolks and casein and amber drops of honey. For her, he had brought the halls of silent fossils and muttering stones to life again, and for that she had always loved him, in her distant, secret way.