The Ammonite Violin & Others (8 page)

I don’t know what will become of these pages.

I may never print them. Or I may print them out and hide them from myself.

I could slip them between the pages of a book in the stacks at NYU and leave them there for anyone to find, I could do that. I could place them in an empty wine bottle and drop them from the Queensboro Bridge so that the river would carry them down to the sea. The sea must be filled with bottles...

“And then,” she says, as though she still imagines that I’ve somehow never heard this story before, “the demons tried to carry the looking glass all the way up to Heaven, that they might even mock the angels.”
But it shattered,
I cut in, trying to sound saber, and she smiles a vitreous sort of smile for me. I catch a glimpse of her uneven bluish teeth, set like mismatched pegs of lazulite into gums the colour of a stormy autumn sky. If I were but a stronger woman—a woman of uncommon courage and resolve—I might now use all my geologist’s rambling vocabulary to describe the physical and optical properties of that half-glimpsed smile, to determine its electron density and Permion index, the axial ratios and x-ray diffraction, diaphaneity, fracture, and etc. and etc., and on and on and on. I would take up my fountain pen and put it all down on paper, and there would be no mention anywhere of her tiresome fairy stories or my deceitful, subjective desires. I would reduce her to the driest of crystallographies. And then she says, as though I never interrupted her, “Every tiny sliver of the broken looking glass retained the full power of the whole, and they rained down over the entire world.”
I’m tired,
I say.
I’m very tired, and now I want to sleep.
So she sighs, exasperated, impatient, exhaling the very breath of Boreas, and a rigged bouquet of frost blooms across the tiny window looking down on the nub end of Gar Fish Street. I’ve never seen her sleep. Not even once in the long three weeks since she came to the decrepit boarding house where I live, bearing a peculiar stone and a threadbare carpetbag and asking after me. Oh, sometimes she yawns, or her eyes flutter in a way as to suggest the dimmest memory of sleep. Her eyes flutter, and those pale lashes scatter snowflakes across my bed, but I’ve never seen her asleep. Perhaps she sleeps only when
I’m
asleep; I can’t prove otherwise. “Most of the bits of the looking glass were so small they were like dust or grains of sand,” she says, still gazing down at the dim and gas-lit cobblestones. “But there were a few fragments large enough to be found and polished flat and smooth and fashioned into windowpanes.” It sounds like a threat, the way she puts it, and also the way she’s staring at the window, and then she turns her pretty head and looks at me, instead. “I should never have come to this terrible old house,” she tells me. “I should have gone to some other town, farther inland, over and across the Klamath Mountains, and we should never have met.” But I know this is a game, not so different from the stories she tells again and again, and I don’t reply. I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. “It’s a wicked, filthy place, this town,” she continues, “a sodden ghetto, fit only for leprous fishmongers and ten-cent Jezebels and—”
And what
? I ask her, my words muffled by the pillow. So here I am playing after all. Here I am dancing for her, and I know without turning to see that she’s wearing that smug lazulite smile again.
Just what else is this filthy old town fit for?
She doesn’t answer me right away, because now I’m dancing, and so she has all the time she needs. I open my eyes and stare at the wall, the peeling ribbons of pin-striped wallpaper, the books stacked high on my rented chifforobe. I put out the lamp some time ago, so the only light in the room is coming from the window, and now she’s gone and blocked half that with the frost from her sigh. “My father,” she says, beginning this
other
lie, “he said that I should find you, that I must seek out the Sapphic professor, so recently disgraced and duly dismissed from her lofty post at University, fallen low and holed up in this squalid abode, drinking herself halfway to death and maybe then back again. He said you know all the deepest secrets of the earth, the mysteries of the ages, and that you even speak with her, the earth, in your dreams. He said I should show you the stone, that only you would know it for what it is.”
But you have no father,
I say, playing the good and faithless heretic, stumbling through my part like the puppet she’s made of me.
You’re merely another wandering war orphan, an urchin whoring her way down the coast. And that precious rock of yours is nothing more than a cast-off ballast stone which you picked up on the beach the morning you crawled off that tramp steamer and first set foot in this wicked, filthy place. You’re an orphan, my dear, and the rock is no more than a gastrolith puked forth from the overfull craw of some whaling ship or another.
She listens silently. She has never interrupted me, as that would be not so very different from interrupting herself. I can remember when there was some force behind these words, before I caught on. Before
I
wised up. I can remember when they had weight and anger. When I meant them, because I mistakenly believed that they were my own.

“My father...” she begins, then trails off, and I feel the temperature in my dingy little fourth-floor room at the end of Gar
Fish
Street plummet ten or fifteen degrees.

—was likely a Russian foot soldier,
I continue for her on cue,
bound for some flea-ridden Kamchatkan hellhole, when he met up with whichever Koryak witch-sow you would have called your mother, had she ever given you the chance.
And yes, these are words from my mouth, spoken by my tongue and passing between my lips, but still they are always
her
words. I shut my eyes, willing silence upon myself (which is easy, as this particular soliloquy has come to its end), and she reaches out and brushes frozen fingertips across the space between my shoulder blades. I gasp, and at least it is
me
gasping, an
honest
gasp at the pain and cold flowing out of her and into me. All the breath driven from my lungs in that instant, and now I must surely look like some gulping, fish-eyed tiling hauled up from the briny sea, my lips going a cyanotic tint and my mouth opening and closing, closing and opening, suffocating on this thin air I coughed out and can’t seem to remember how to breathe back in. Then she presses her palm flat against my back, and the chill doubles, trebles, expands ten-fold and tenfold again between one gasp and the next. She draws the warmth from me, because she can manufacture none of her own. Because, she says, she has been cursed by her own father, a man who conjures blizzards from clear summer skies and commands the grinding courses of mighty glaciers. A wizard king of snow and ice who has so condemned his own daughter because she would not be his consort in some unnatural and incestuous liaison. It’s as good an explanation as any for what she is and what she’s done to me, again and again and again, though I can believe it no more than I can believe that six and three are ten or that the sun and moon move round about the Earth. I am unaccustomed and unreceptive to phantasia and mike believe, even when I find myself trapped hopelessly within it. Perhaps my disbelief can be a prison as surely as this room, as surely as her wintry hand pressed against my spine, but I’ve little enough remaining of my former life, those vanished years when there was still camaraderie and purpose and dignity. By all the gods in which I have never sought comfort I will cling to Reason, no matter how useless it may prove before she is done with me. She leans near, and her breath spills across my face like Arctic waters. “I am alone,” she says sweetly, and with a brittle edge of loss. “I have no one now but you, no one and nothing, only you and that damned stone. You will love me. You will love me as you have never comprehended love before. And your love will be the furnace to finally melt the sorcery that binds me.” I would laugh at her, at these preposterous lines she might have ripped from the pages of some penny dreadful or stolen from a bit of low burlesque, but my throat has frozen over. I might as well be stone now. She has made of me the very thing I’ve spent my life researching and cataloging, for what is ice but water assuming a solid mineral form? I am made her petrifaction, and she leans nearer still and kisses me upon my icy lips. I wish that she’d at least allowed me to shut my eyes this time, just this once, that I would not now be forced to
see
her, to stare back into the daemon lover who is staring into me. That too-round china-doll face and the wild, tumbling cataract of hair as white as snow spun into silk, her bitter lazulite grin, her own eyes the colour of a living oyster pulled from out its bivalve shell. In this moment, I could almost believe her tales of broken mirrors and snow queens, lost children and cruel magician fathers. And then she touches me, her hands seeking out the frigid gash of my sex, and I am no longer even granted the tethered freedoms of a marionette. I am at best a chiseled pagan idol to polar bears and hungry killer whales, a statue upon which she will prostrate herself, stealing from me such pleasures as she might wish and can yet endure.

Later, long hours later, after she’s grown bored with me and after dawn and sunrise and after my blood has thawed to slush and I’m left shivering and fevery, I sit naked at the foot of the bed in the boarding-house room on Gar Fish Street and sip the cheapest available gin from a tin cup. She’s gone out. I cannot say with any certainty
where
she goes, but she disappears from time to time. It’s not unusual if she doesn’t return for days, and I can not help but to imagine that she must have other unfortunates trapped in other dingy rooms scattered throughout the city. I stare back at my reflection, watching myself from the cracked mirror mounted crookedly on the dressing table. Perhaps, I think, she is gathering to her an
army
of puppets, and at the last she will have us take up filming brands and march against her wizard father, locked in his palace of ice and baling Mire. I raise the cup to my lips, and the woman in the mirror obligingly does the same. I’ve seen corpses floating in the harbour that looked more alive than her, more alive than me. I could have aged ten years in these few weeks. My lover his stolen more from me than simple warmth, of that I
am
certain. She’s diminished me with every successive freeze and thaw, and this reflection is little more than a ghost of the woman who arrived here from San Francisco last summer. I came to hide and drink and maybe die, for there would
never
be any return to that former life of privilege and reward which had been so hastily, so thoughtlessly, traded for hurried trysts with one of my first-year students, a yellow-haired girl whose name I can hardly now recollect. I only came here to be a drunkard and, in time, a suicide, to drift farther and farther away from the world which would have no more of me. I thought surely that would be penance enough for all my sins. I never dared conceive of any punishment so sublime as the wizard’s daughter. No, I do not believe she is the daughter of a wizard, but how else would I name her? One might, I tried to make a game of guessing at some other appellation, whether Christian or heathen, but she waved away every suggestion I made. Hundreds or thousands of names dismissed, and there was never anything in her wet oyster eyes but truth. But I may be a poor, poor judge of truth, and we should keep that in mind. After all, remember, some fraction of me
believed
the yellow-haired girl in San Francisco when she promised that she’d never so much as whisper even the most nebulous hint of our nights together to another living soul. Indeed, I may be no fit judge of truth at all. The woman in the mirror who looks exactly like my corpse takes another sip of gin, realizes the cup is almost empty, and reaches for the quart bottle on the floor. She fills my cup halfway, and I thank her for such boundless generosity. The wizard’s daughter, she won’t ever deign to drink with me, though she sometimes returns from her disappearances with the gift of a fresh bottle—gin or rye whiskey or the peaty brown ale they brew down by the waterfront. She says she doesn’t drink with anyone or alone, so I don’t take it personally.

“Aren’t you a sorry sight,” the woman in the mirror says to me. “A shame the way you’ve let yourself go. Can you even remember the last time you bathed? Or took a comb to your hair, perhaps?” And so I tell her to go fuck herself.

Then there are footsteps in the hallway, and I listen, expecting them to stop outside my door, expecting the dry rattle of a key in the lock, and then the cut-glass knob will turn and—

“The Tolowa Indians have a story about a crazy woman who talks to her reflection—”

Shut up,
I hiss at my own face in the dressing-table mirror and almost drop the tin cup, my heart pounding and hands shaking so badly that no small measure of gin splashes over the rim and darkens the grimy floor at my feet.
Such a waste
, I think,
such a pointless, goddamned waste
, and by then the footsteps in question have come and gone, and it isn’t the wizard’s daughter, after all. Only another lodger or someone else, a prostitute or sneak thief or a dutiful officer of the law, coming to call upon another lodger. I reach for the gin bottle before the woman in the mirror does it for me.
She gives me dreams
, I say and, having refilled my cup, shove the cork firmly back into the mouth of the bottle. I can not afford another spill today, for I am in no condition to dress myself and descend the stairs to the smoky lobby and the narrow street beyond and still have to walk the two blocks (uphill) from the boarding house on Gar Fish Street to the Gramercy Digs Saloon on the corner of Muskie and Walleye. And I have no guarantee that she will bring me another bottle, either, as her small mercies and smaller kindnesses are, at best, capricious and wholly unpredictable.
She gives me dreams
, I say again, because I do not think the mirror woman heard me the first time.

“Does she?” the doppelgänger asks. It’s grinning at me now, only that is not
my
grin, those rotting lazulite pegs in swollen stormy gums, but its is still my face. “I was until this moment quite unaware that any among the Oneiroi concealed a cunt between its legs.”