The Ammonite Violin & Others (9 page)

I shut my eyes, praying to no one and nothing that I’ll stop shaking and my teeth with stop chattering, wishing for warmth and sunlight and wishing, too, that I had even hall the strength I’d need to get to my feet and stand and walk the five or six steps to the three-legged chair where my overcoat and gloves are lying in a careless heap. But I am too sick and much too drunk to try. I would wind up on the floor, and that’s where she would find me when she returns. I would rather suffer this chill in my veins and my bones than have her find me sprawled naked upon the floor, unconscious in a pool of spilled gin and my own piss. Behind my eyelids, the dreams she has given unfold like flickering cinematograph projections. And I keep my eyes tightly closed, lest these Lumiere images escape from out the windows of my blighted soul and fall upon the silvered glass, for I have no mind to share them with that grinning fiend behind the mirror. The wizard’s daughter has given them to me, and so they are mine and mine alone—this clouded, snow-dimmed sky spread wide above a winter forest of blue spruce and fir and pine, the uneasy shadows huddled beneath the sagging boughs. I have been walking all my life, it seems, or, more precisely, all my
afterlife,
those many long months since my abrupt departure from San Francisco. The howling, wolf-throated wind stings my bare face, and I stumble blindly forward through snow piled almost as high as my knees. I cannot feel my feet. I am become no more or less than a phantom of frostbite and rags, lost and certain that I will never again be anything but lost. I know what lies ahead of me, what she brings me here to see, again and again and again. It was only a surprise that first time I walked these woods, and also the second time, as I’ve never suffered from recurring dreams. My lungs ache, filled as they are with the thin air which seems heavy and thick as lead, and then I’ve reached the place where the trees end, opening onto a high alpine meadow. In summer, the ground here would be resplendent in green and splashed with the gay blooms of black-eyed susans and Joe-Pye weed, columbine and parry clover. But this is a dead month, a smothered month—December or January, the ending or beginning of the year—and perhaps all months are dead here. Perhaps every word she’s told me is the truth, plain and simple, and this
is
truly a blasted land which will never again know spring grasses, nor the quickening hues of wildflowers.
Do not show me this
, I plead, but I cannot ever say whether these are words spoken or merely words thought. Either way, they tumble from me, silently or whispered from my cracked and bleeding lips.
Do not show me this. Don’t make me set. I know, I know already what happened here, because I’ve seen it all before, and there is no profit in seeing it ever again.
She does not answer me. Only the wind speaks to me here, as it rushes down from the raw charcoal-coloured peaks, the sky’s breath pouring out across splintered metamorphic teeth and over the meadow. And this is what I behold: a great crimson sleigh with gilded rails and runners drawn by Indian ponies, like something a red-skinned Father Christmas might command; a single granite standing stone or menhir of a sort not known to exist in the Americas—there are glyphs or pictographs graven upon the stone, which I can never quite see clearly; and in the lee of the menhir, there is an enormously obese man wrapped in bearskin robes and a naked girl child kneeling in the snow at his feet. The man holds a four-gallon metal pail over her, and the furs which the girl must have worn only moments before are spread out very near the crimson sleigh. The man and the girl can not be more than fifty feet away from me, and every time I have tried to cry out, to draw his attention towards myself, to forestall what I know is coming next. And I have tried, too, to leave the shelter of the treeline and cross the meadow to the spot where he stands and she kneels and the granite menhir looms threatfully above them both. From the first time I beheld it with my dreaming eyes, I have understood that there is more to this awful standing stone than its constituent molecules, far more than mere chemistry and mineralogy can fathom. It is an evil thing, and the man in the bearskin robes is somehow in its service or its debt. It has stood a thousand years, perhaps, demanding offerings and forfeiture—and no, it matters not that I do not even now believe in the existence of evil beyond a shorthand phrase for the cruelties and insanity of human beings. It matters not in the least, for in the dream, the menhir, or something trapped within the stone,
glances
towards the edge of the forest, and it
sees
me there. And I can feel its delight, that there is an audience to this atrocity. I feel its perfect hatred, deeper and blacker than the submarine canyons out beyond the harbour. “Are you cold, my darling?” the enormous man growls, and then he spits on the shivering girl at his feet. “Would you have me build for you a lovely roaring fire to chase the frostnip from your toes and fingertips?”

But she was not the same girl,
my reflection calmly professes from its place behind the dressing table.
Not the same girl as your visitor.

She was
, I reply through gritted teeth and without opening my eyes.
She was that very same girl.

But the girl in your dream—her hair is red as a sunset, and her eyes blue as lapis lazuli. So, you see, she cannot possibly be your pale companion.

The Tolowa Indians have a story about a crazy woman who talks to her reflection
, I say, and at that the mirror falls silent again, but I know it wears a smirking satisfaction on its borrowed face. And there in the high meadow, the man wrapped in bearskins slowly pours water from his pail over the naked body of the red-haired girl. She screams, but only once, and makes no attempt whatsoever to escape. Her cry startles the ponies, and they neigh and stamp their hooves. “Is that better?” the man asks her, and already the water has begun to freeze on her skin, before the pail is even empty. “Are you warmer now?” I can hear the menhir laughing behind his back, an ancient, ugly sound which I could never hope to describe, the laughter of granite which isn’t granite at all. For a moment it seems somehow less solid, and in my horror I imagine the menhir bending down low over the man and the dying girl. “See there?” the fat man cackles and tosses his pail away. “You are
mine
, child. You were mine from the start, from the day you slithered from twixt your momma’s nethers, and you’ll never be anyone else’s.” But she can no longer hear him. I am certain of that, for the cold mountain air has turned the water solid, sealing and stealing her away, and I cannot help but think of the fossils of prehistoric flies and ants which I’ve seen encased in polished lumps of Baltic amber. The man spits on her again, spits at the crust of new ice concealing her, and then he turns and trudges away through the snow to the sleigh and the two waiting ponies. “Let her lie there till the spring,” he bellows, taking up the leather reins and giving them a violent shake. “Let her lie there seven winters and another after that!” And then the sleigh is racing away, those golden runners not slicing through the snow, but seeming instead to float somehow an inch or so above it. And then I feel the ground fall away beneath my feet, in this nightmare which she has given to me, that I might witness her desecration and murder a hundred hundred times. The day vanishes and I drop feet-first into an abyss, through the hollow, rotten heart of the world, and for a time I am grateful my eyes can no longer see, and that the only sound is the air rushing past my ears as I fall.

She comes back early the next morning, shortly after I have risen and had my first drink of the day and managed to dress in my slovenly, mannish best, feeling just a little more myself for her time away from me. The night before, I hardly slept, tossing and turning, starting awake at every sound, no matter how far off or insignificant it might have been. Towards dawn there was a foreboding, melancholy sort of dream in which I watched a waxing quarter moon sinking into the sea and the sun coming up over the town where it huddles at the crumbling edge of the continent. This cluttered grotesquerie of winding lanes and leaning clapboard cottages, chimneys and cisterns and rusting corrugated tin roofs, and the few brick-and-mortar buildings so scabbed with mosses and ferns and such other local flora that one might easily mistake them for some natural part of the landscape, only lately and incompletely modified to the needs of men. The morning washed away the night, finishing off the drowning moon, and the motley assortment of boats and small ships moored along the wharves seemed no more than bobbing toys awaiting the hands of children. The morning light snagged in their sails and rigging, and a grey flock of gulls arising from the narrow, mussel-littered beach screeched out her name, which I heard clearly, but knew I would forget immediately upon waking. It was a peaceable scene, in its way, and I thought perhaps this is as good a place to lie down and die as any other. But, even so, I could not shake the sense that something immeasurably old and malign watched the town from the redwood forests crowding in on every side. Something that had trailed her here, possibly. Or something that had been here all along, something that was already here aeons before the mountains were heaved up from a sea swarming with great reptiles and ammonites and archaic species of gigantic predatory fish. Either way, they were in league now, the wizard’s wayward daughter and this unseen watcher in the trees, and I alone knew of their alliance. The dream ended as a velvet curtain was drawn suddenly closed to hide what I realized had only been the most elaborate set arranged upon a theatre stage, a cleverly lit and orchestrated miniature to fool my sleeping eyes, and then there was vaudeville, and then opera, and I woke to Verdi from a phonograph playing loudly across the hallway from my room.

“We should go for a walk together,” she says and half fills my tin cup with gin. “Hand in hand, yes? Brazen in our forbidden love for one another.”

I don’t love you,
I tell her.
I have never loved you,
but I can see from the knowing glimmer in her oyster eyes that she recognizes my lie at once.
Besides,
I add,
nothing which is properly depraved or deviant is forbidden hen, unless it be some arcane offence to the patron saints of kelp and syphilitic mariners which I’ve yet to stumble upon. Why else would we be so tolerated here, you and I?
And, at that, she puts the cork back into the bottle and scowls at me. “Speak for yourself,” she says. “I go where I like. I do as I wish.” I laugh at her and sip my gin. She stands up, her petticoats rustling like snowy boughs, and I wonder what the townspeople descry when they look at her. Do they see her breath fog on balmy summer afternoons? Do they notice the scum of frost left behind on anything she’s touched? Do they ever detect the faint auroral flicker from her pupils, a momentary glint of brilliant reds or greens or blues from her otherwise lifeless eyes? Or are they so accustomed to minding their own affairs—for I
am
convinced this town is a refuge for the damned and cast-away—that they see only some shabby girl too plain for even the most unpretentious sporting house? I’ll never know, for I’ll never have the courage to ask them. Secretly, I fear I am the only one who can see her, and I am possessed of no pressing desire to have this irrational dread confirmed. “Oh, they see well enough,” she says, and I am not surprised. Puppets have no private thoughts. She lingers before the dressing-table mirror, straightening the folds of her skirt. “They see and stay awake nights, wishing they could forget the sight of me.” This seems to please her, and so she smiles, and I have another drink from my dented tin cup. “Or they long for my embrace,” she continues. “They pine for my attentions. They can think of naught else save the torment of my cold hand about their prick or pressed tight to their windward passage. Some have been driven nigh unto
seppuku
or have learned to tie a hangman’s noose, should the longing grow more than merely unbearable.” And I reply that I can believe that part, at least, though myself I would prefer a bullet in the brain. “No, that’s a
real
man’s death.” she says and turns to face me. “Mow, have you figured out my stone? Last night, a magpie found me behind the livery and brought word from my father who wishes me home at the earliest possible date. But
not
without your learn’d observations, my sweet professor.” I stare silently into my cup for a moment, my stomach sour and cramping, and I tell that her I’m in no mood for the game today Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe the day after, and, in the meantime, she should haunt some other poor bitch or bastard. “But the magpie was quite insistent,” she says. “You know by now that my father is not a patient man, even at his best, and he has long since tired of waiting on your verdict.” And she holds the peculiar stone out to me as she has done so many times before.
But what of the curse?!
ask her, resigned that there will be no allowances today for hangovers and sour stomachs. I know all these lines by heart.
What of winning my love, the furnace to finally melt the sorcery that binds you? Has someone gone and changed the rules? Do yon begin to miss the old man’s cock between your legs?
She smiles her vitreous smile once more to flash those bluish pegs she wears for teeth, and closes her fingers around the stone resting in her palm. “Surely you didn’t take me
seriously?
” she scoffs. “My father is a proud man, a man of principles and lofty morals, and he would
never
permit me to take a lesbian dipsomaniac for my husband.”

You have no father,
I remind her, because I know all these lines by heart, and she would have me say nothing more or less.
Ton were born into a brothel but a few miles farther up the coast, the albino child of a half-nigger whore and a chink from a medicine show. Fortunately, your mother sold you to a kind-hearted merchant marine for two pints and a black pearl broach, saving yon from a life spent peddling pussy and Clark Stanley’s make oil liniment. Sadly, though, your adoptive father soon perished at sea when his ship was pulled down by the arms of a giant cephalopod.
She smiles again, licks her lips, and asks eagerly, “The Kraken of Norwegian legend?”
One and the same, I have no doubt about it. But you survived,
and I pause to drain and then refill my cup.
You were discovered in a leaky wicker basket one midsummer eve, carried in on the high tide.
And she tells me she’d almost forgotten that story, but I know that she’s lying, that it’s her most-favored of the lot. “That’s so much better than the one in which I’m a Cossack’s illegitimate daughter on the run from Czarist spies, or the other one, where we’re actually half sisters, but I have been stricken with an hysterical amnesia beyond the curative powers of even the most accomplished alienist.” Her voice rattles inside my skull like dice, like razor shards of ice. It is slicing apart my brain, and soon my thoughts will be little more than tatters. No, they were tattered long ago, if truth be told. I place three fingers against the soft spot at my left temple, as if this mere laying on of hands would alone lie enough to still the mad somersault of her words. “Though I was only an infant,” slit says, “I can almost recall my valiant, grief-stricken father swaddling me in his pea jacket and placing me inside that basket as the sea monster wailed and gnawed at the bowsprit.”
No,
I reply,
you never had a father,
and for the briefest fraction of a moment I see (or only
wish
I’d see) the dull gleam of disappointment in her damp oyster eyes, as though she’d begun to believe (or at least
wishes
to believe) in her own canard. “No nutter,” she sighs. “As I was saying, the snowflakes grew bigger and bigger until they resembled nothing so much as fat white geese.”
That’s not what you were saying,
I tell her.
You were reminding me of the stone and your father’s impatient need to know its provenance.
But she ignores me, already deep into the middle of a story she’s told so many times it hardly matters where she begins the tale. “The big sled stopped, and the child saw then that it was driven by a tall and upright lady, all shining white—the Snow Queen herself. “It is cold enough to kill one,’ she said. ‘Creep inside my bearskin.’”
But you’ve never had a mother, either,
I say, and then, before she can reply or withdraw any deeper into that moth-eaten narrative, Kay and Gerda and the Snow Queen, the demons and their grinning looking glass, I ask to see the stone.