The Music of Razors (11 page)

London, New York, Boston, the Mojave, Mexico. Twenty years of questing after a notion that would leave you no more readily than your ability to breathe in your sleep.

And then, one blue night on a stretch of red desert, there it was. Twenty years of accumulated suspicions, tenuous conclusions, and spurious inspirations assembled themselves into something that was close enough to the formation of a coherent idea that a leap was made, you acknowledged something that had remained unknown since before Creation was Created, and many of those close to you died screaming—one syllable—beneath the shattering vastness that is the knowledge of it.

And so you walk, though you have no need to. Everywhere is open to you now.

This is life on the run from everything you’ve built. You walk because it keeps your mind busy. Everywhere, words: the crunch of pale soil beneath your battered shoes, the shriek of a carrion bird, a breath of wind. A piece of each sound, a disparate sequence of enforced emphasis, enunciates your name.

Dorian.

Your feet crunch a dry tattoo. The scree rustles faintly. A creek bubbles.

Dorian.

This is Arizona. You’ve decided to walk to California from Mexico, because it seems like penance. Because you can. Because you may as well be dead. Because towns and cities are too loud. They build sentences.

The angel is everywhere. The emphases of the sounds you hear are altered by your knowledge that the angel exists; knowledge that makes the angel real. Birds, horse clip, wind, coughs…you hear notes in the soup and those notes form words, ideas, instructions. Like seeing a face in the clouds you hear a deformed voice in the collected soundstream of the world around you.

You cannot help but hear.

It told you where to find its scattered instruments, how to use them, and now it wants you to return it to its Name, and its Sigil. It wants to be Known once more. It wants you to build an army and…

You clap your hands to your ears, and in the roaring of your own blood it keeps speaking.

Dorian.

You shout to drown it out, and of course that only makes it clearer.

Dorian.

You cram your fingers into the canals of your ears, ferreting deeper, sinking to your knees. You scrabble for anything—a stick or a twig—enough is enough. You’ve almost punctured your drums on a handful of occasions, always stopping short, but enough is enough.

“Dorian.”

“Shut up!”
You snatch the pocketknife from your small suitcase, and look into the sun.

“D…Dorian?”

Two figures, on the road. Looking at you. You know them.

You’re panting, heavy. The road stones bite through and into your knees. Your mouth is dry. You struggle to your feet, knife in hand.

“What…what do you want? I didn’t send for you.”

The bronze automaton never takes her eyes off you.

“If you would, Tub.”

Tub walks toward you, something in his broad hand.

“You made us in such a fashion, Mr. Athelstane,” Nimble says, “that communicating our concerns to you directly is beyond us. However, the delivery of a letter is not.”

Tub holds it up to you. The little ogre has never looked at you with anything less than a desire to make you happy. Until now.

You take the letter from his hand. You know what it is, and the insolence of it fills you with a glowing anger.

“If I may, Mr. Athelstane, I would advise against destroying the letter. You…will not be receiving another.”

The catch in her voice snags your attention. With the sun at Nimble’s back it is not clear what expression her face holds, but you’ve never seen Tub look at anything the way he is looking at you now.

You open the letter. The angel repeats your name with each succession of paper-on-skin.

The letter is written in a very competent hand. Millicent has grown quite a bit since you last saw her.

“She wants to see you. One last time,” the ballerina says. “Before she dies.”

Tub’s breath pounds out of his flat nostrils.

“Will you come?”

This is life from knee height. You had retrieved the letter in the few moments between the doctor leaving Millicent’s room and Mama reentering. As Millicent gave it to you she made you promise that Father would receive the letter, and read it, and that he would return to look after Mama. You remember your brass fingers touching her cold white hand ever so briefly as the paper was taken…and then the door opened, and both you and Tub were back in the Drop. Your fingers still reaching for hers.

You never saw Millicent again.

THREE

NOWHERE, 1850

T
HERE ARE TWO THINGS TO REMEMBER IN THIS LIFE: THAT
the worst crimes are committed in the name of love, and that everyone makes mistakes.

A nameless way station of a town, somewhere in Arizona. It is 1850, in the moments before Henry Lockrose says, “Let me help you.”

The stranger had crashed through his front door and found Henry at the table in the room that functioned sometimes as a surgery, sometimes as a dining room.

Henry’s free hand found the revolver strapped under the table.

For a moment Henry had, as he looked up from his glass, assumed that this was it: an unhappy patient come to take satisfaction from the choice placement of a bullet.

That wasn’t to be the case. Had his eyes been two drinks clearer he would have realized he had never seen this panicked soul before. But they weren’t, and he didn’t.

“Who is it?”

“I’ve been traveling for an age,” the stranger was saying, tearing at his clothes, shedding his coat. “Help me.” He sounded French. Henry had never treated a Frenchman that he could recall.

He sat straighter, peering at the man. Unwashed hair, long face, angular. He knew now this was no patient, no vagrant in need of a quick stitch. “Who is it?” he asked again.

“Help me,” the stranger said, struggling with the weight of his coat, tearing his arm from one stubbornly inside-out sleeve. His hair was long and dark and unkempt, his face unshaven. His eyes were those of the gallows-bound, ignorant and desperate, animal-like and lost. “For God’s sake.”

His coat hit the floor. The shirt fell forward over his arms and off his haggard frame, split down the back.

Such garments were worn by dead men propped in coffins outside an undertaker’s. Henry’s immediate assumption was that this man had been desperate for clothing and had stolen the tunic from an unwatched corpse.

“What has he done to me?”

And the stranger displayed the long, straight wound that sundered his back.

Too deep to have been survived.

The man was on his knees now, facing away with his head in his hands. The wound yawned as he bent over himself.

Within the raw crevasse at the center of the man, Henry saw a light like silver fire. A twisted, sculpted nugget of starlight, nestled to his beating heart.

Henry released the hidden pistol.

Something told him, a part that still desired to be great, said:
Take him, take this man, take him in.

“Let me help you,” Henry said. And drained his glass with a fluttering hand.

“Why is a man so young as you living alone in a town like this?” the stranger asked.

Henry didn’t answer. He found it easier saying nothing.

With only a few opium pills to dull the pain of the stitching—and it had been deep, brutal work—the stranger hadn’t flinched. It was as if he had taken himself away during it all, his brown eyes switching off as he lay facedown on the very table they now ate from.

“My name is Felix Tranquille Henot.”

Henry said nothing.

“You have few possessions, Doctor.”

The words touched a part of him, but his mind was elsewhere.

“You have not asked how I came by the wound.”

Henry looked sidelong at his mouthy visitor and said, “Questions never got me anywhere.”

But the wound was intriguing: a straight incision, one clean stroke. And so deep. Flesh and bone parted to the left of the first dorsal vertebra almost straight down to the twelfth. The thick slab of the trapezius muscle and latissimus dorsi had been shorn in half, yet the patient, Felix, had suffered no loss of mobility to the left side of his body. There was no bleeding, though the flesh remained warm if somewhat pale. Yellow fingers of bone punctuated the interior of the wound—the clean stumps of severed ribs flexed and ground as Felix moved, yet caused him no pain. If anything it seemed Felix’s initial distress had been a purely psychological reaction to the extent of his wound and nothing more.

It could not be, of course. Henry knew that. One does not sever muscle and expect the associated limbs to continue functioning. That is a patent impossibility. And yet it was happening.

This was the first inexplicable characteristic of his patient. The second was the silver object Henry had found nestled inside the greater cavity of Felix’s body—visible through the wound—and been reluctant to remove. Given Henry’s inability to explain his patient’s continued health and mobility, or to explain the mercurial thing he had found wedged beside Felix’s heart, Henry could only assume the two phenomena were related. It appeared the artifact caused the man no harm or discomfort so he had left it where it was, and Felix continued to talk, and live, and move.

“The one who gave me this wound…he travels,” Felix was saying. “Widely.”

Henry was visited by faces, often at that very table. Or rather, pieces of faces. He could not recall with any precision how she had looked those ten years ago. He remembered her strength, and how smitten he had been by her, but he could not recall her face as it had been before death. The face that came back to him at that table was postmortem, misshapen, and black with bruising.

It was so hard to shake the memory of an ending.

It was as if all he could remember was endings.

“He wishes me dead,” Felix said.

Once in a while Henry would remember a detail, something small—like the shape of an eye or the sweep of her hair—and the rest of her face would rise up in full through the fog of lost memory, and he would see her again, as she was. But that happened less and less nowadays.

“I believe he will follow me, Doctor.”

The Frenchman was a wiry sort. Not imposing. Courtly, after a fashion. Hair grown longer than the current styles Henry had seen sported by passers-through.

“Who is he, then,” Henry asked.

“An Englishman.”

The English. Henry didn’t like the English. A ten-year-old aversion.

“I have a cot,” Henry said. “I let it out to patients I need an eye on. You can use it so long as no one else needs it.” He poured two more fingers of bourbon, left the bottle uncorked. “In exchange I could use someone to keep the place clean.”

For the second time in his life Henry began to realize how easy it was for him to become addicted to human company.

He had been part of this town almost ten years now, ten years of getting by on patching the wounded and caring for the occasional malady. Once he’d even used some of that schooling to excise an ovarian tumor from a lady on her way to San Francisco, though that had been years before. She’d wanted it done in a real hospital, but would never have made it that far.

For eight months her husband had thought himself a father, so swollen was her belly, until the ninth and tenth months brought terrible pains but no sign of the onset of birth. The doctors revised their opinions, and gave the couple an address in San Francisco. The woman had made it as far as Henry’s way-station town before the pain became crippling.

The husband had protested, of course; he took one look at Henry and said he would take his chances with the highway. “The highway”—that’s what he had called it. He’d been an Englishman as well.

But the wife, more resolute because the endangered life was her own, said she would stay, while the husband had been taken away by the townsfolk to get drunk. Henry knew murder played inside the husband’s head. If the operation failed and the Englishman’s wife died, so would he. One way or another.

And so the operation had been performed on this table. Henry had administered the last of his opium pills to the woman, and as she began crooning hymns he made an incision three inches from the musculus rectus abdominus, on the left-hand side. He continued for nine inches parallel with the muscle and extended into the cavity of the abdomen.

Brain-colored intestines burst forth immediately, spilling onto the table. Henry had cried out, a brief bark, the back of his arm covering his mouth. The abdomen was so filled by the mass of her disease that her innards had immediately rushed out onto the table. He had made this table himself, with wood he had felled himself and tools he had purchased from the general store in town. It was the same kind of table he had made with his father, as a boy. This shack, which he had also made himself, was the same kind of house he had been raised in, back in Vermont, in a life so distant it was more like something he had been told about, rather than lived. Even Boston felt a universe apart from him. He was dry, tongue sticking to the roof of his parched mouth, as he realized it would be impossible to replace her intestines until the tumor was excised. No going back, no apologies, no sending the couple on their way. He would save her, or the husband would return and murder Henry across the opened and soul-fled body of his wife.

The woman had stared at the ceiling, conscious and sweating, crooning in the transports of opium. She had obviously led a comfortable life up to this point, this woman. There had been nothing hard about her. It would have been a simple thing to have unwittingly allowed life to slip free of a frame so delicate and unresisting. As it was, Henry greatly suspected, now that the inner wall of the abdomen had been exposed to the atmosphere she stood an equal risk of losing her life to peritoneal inflammation as she did to dying beneath his blades. He remembered nights at the Coat and Arms. Remembered studying something related to this, with her, after his expulsion from medical college. He remembered the way she used to tease him, in roundabout ways, for knocking down his classmate on her behalf. He remembered how she feigned horror at the act, but smiled and laughed quietly nonetheless. God, that beautiful laugh. He burned at her memory. Even among the educated and wise she had been incredible. How many of them could open doors for the dead? How many of them could summon angels?

He wiped his eyes with the back of his arm and continued.

In preparation for the operation Henry had abstained from liquor for twelve hours. Even before he had begun to work the stench of old sour mash was sweating through his skin. He could smell it even above the stench of blood and disease.

The body of the tumor appeared—filthy looking and jelly-like, massive. Henry placed as stout a ligature as he was able around the fallopian tube near the uterus, and then cut the tumor. The tumor was the ovarium and the fimbrial part of the fallopian, only grossly enlarged. Henry removed fifteen pounds of it, and then cut through the swollen and inflamed fallopian to extract the sac. That must have been seven pounds’ worth alone.

The entire operation took an hour, and at the end of those sixty minutes the woman still lived. As gently as he could, with weak and shaking hands, he rolled her onto her side and drained the blood (it sounded like rain on stone as it hit the dining room floor), then closed the opening with an interrupted suture, leaving enough of an opening at the lower end for the fallopian ligature. As a further precaution, between every two stitches he placed a strip of adhesive plaster to keep the parts in contact and hasten the healing. Then came the treated bandages and dressings.

Husband and wife took a room in town, at the hole, for a number of days. Each time Henry made the journey to buy a bottle it provided him the chance to observe her for any sign of inflammation. Each time her Englishman husband wore the dark, rigid look of a man insulted by his presence.

There was no infection. She lived.

Days later, as the couple trundled away on their carriage, Henry knew—with more certainty than he had ever known—that he was a great surgeon. That this was what he had been born to do. What he had sacrificed so much to be. What he had killed to become.

Yet Henry could no longer bring himself to feel for these people. He groped for empathy out of some withered sense of duty, but there was nothing for him to grasp. Death was nothing. No great tragedy, no cause for outrage. What was the span of one human life in the span of Creation? Nothing. No great drama, no cause for anything.

Of course there had been a time when he believed otherwise. When he had stood, virginal and untouched, blinking at the wonder of it all. When he still possessed friends who breathed.

Perhaps that was why Felix’s insistence that the Englishman would come for him began to occupy Henry’s thoughts. Now that Henry had someone to pass his days with, the thought of being alone once more was more than he could bear. In his darkest moods he hated the Frenchman for that.

He was a good doctor. It was all worth it. He had his craft, his discipline, his life. He needed nothing else. Ten years in this town, and not one real conversation in that time. No exchange beyond what was necessary. People accepted it from him. Then Felix showed up.

“Coffee?” the Frenchman asked.

Henry looked up from his journal and its age-yellowing pages. The last entry was dated over seven years ago. “Thank you.” He bowed his head back to work, then stopped. “Felix?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“You’re a great help to me, Felix.”

The Frenchman smiled. “I’ll get your coffee.”

A makeshift bed of blankets had been set up on the floor by Felix’s cot. A man rested there now, by the cot, under observation for cramps. Probably gutrot—he had the stink of an alcoholic.

Henry returned to his writings.

On the thirty-ninth day everything changed. Felix was late returning from town.

When an hour turned to two, Henry put on the wide-brimmed hat, which had rested on its hook behind the door for years, shrugged into the old black coat he never wore, and started walking.

Henry lived half an hour’s walk outside town. If anyone needed attention bad enough they’d find him, and if they couldn’t make it they were beyond help to start with.

He found comfort in the deadness of the place. The wiry grasses and sandy soil. The distant silhouettes of thin carnivores, the hidden eyes of the scavengers and predators. The sky was perfect, unmarred by clouds. An infinite blue canopy and miles of parchment-colored earth. It would be blistering by ten.