Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (17 page)

“Did you ever talk about this with your mother or grandmother?” the doctor (not doctor, not real doctor – therapist) asked him, and he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “We didn’t ever talk about that day.”

“I see,” the therapist said and slowly nodded her head. She did that a lot, that slow up and down agreement or reassurance nod, and chewed the eraser end of her pencil.

“What else can you remember about that day, Olan?” she asked him.

He thought a moment, what to say, what to hold back, what could never be explained, thoughtsifting, filtering, and finally said, “We went inside, and she locked all the doors and windows. My grandmother came out of the kitchen and watched with us, and she prayed. She held her rosary and prayed. I remember that the house smelled like butter beans.”

“You must have had it all over you, then? The blood.”

“Yeah,” he said. “When it stopped falling, my mother took me to the bathroom and scrubbed my skin with Ivory Soap. She nearly scrubbed me raw.”

“Did your mother often give you baths, Olan?” the therapist asked, and he looked at her a while without answering, realizing how angry he had become, the sudden fury nested in him for this woman who nodded and feigned comprehension and compassion.

“What are you getting at?” he asked her, and she took the pencil eraser from her mouth.

“Was it out of the ordinary, that degree of intimacy between you and your mother?”

“I was covered in blood,” he said, hearing the brittle edge in his voice. “Both of us were, and she was scared. We thought maybe it was the end of the world.”

“So it was unusual? Is that what you’re saying?”

And he remembered his mother dragging him down the hall, a redblack handprint smear he left on the wall, and her crying and stripping off his ruined clothes, the suspicion that it was somehow
his
fault, this horrible thing, and Where’s Biscuit? he’d kept asking her, where’s Biscuit?

“I have to go now,” he said, and the therapist put down her pencil and apologized for nothing in particular, apologized twice if she’d upset him. He paid her, twenty-five dollars because she was seeing him on a sliding scale, she’d explained at the start. A twenty and three ones and some change, and she gave him a receipt.

“Will you be back next week? I have you down for three o’clock on Thursday, but if that’s too late – ”

“I don’t know,” he said, dishonest, and she nodded again, and Olan never went back to her office.

“Well?” he asks the girl, The Academic, “Are you going to open it or not?” and she looks up slowly from the brown paper bag in her hands, confused eyes, surprise and a scrap of a smile on her lips.

“Is this a present?” she asks. “Are you giving me a present, Olan?” And he can hear the caution, the do-I-want-to-encourage-this-sort-of-thing wariness in her voice. But he knows that she will accept what’s in the bag, because she’s brought him food and beer and talked to him, and rejecting such a small reciprocation would seem unkind. He has noticed that The Academic has a great unwillingness to seem unkind.

“It’s not much,” she says as the hallway silence is interrupted by the rustle of the paper bag when she opens it. She reaches inside and takes out the padlock and hasp set, the shrink-wrapped Yale he bought at a hardware store seven blocks away. “It’s not much,” Olan says again, because it isn’t, and because he thinks that’s the sort of thing you say when you give someone a gift.

She stares at it a moment without saying anything, and he says, “It’s a rough neighborhood. It didn’t used to be, but it is now.”

“Yeah,” she replies, and he can see that she’s still rummaging for words. “Thanks, Olan. That’s very thoughtful of you. I’ll put it on the door this afternoon.”

“You’re welcome,” and to change the subject, because it’s not hard to see how uncomfortable she is, he asks “How’s the new chapter coming along?”

“Ah, um, well, you know. It’s coming,” she says and smiles more certainly now, shrugs, and “God, I’m being so rude, letting you just stand out there in the hall. Do you want to come in, Olan? I needed to take a break anyway.”

“No,” he says, maybe a little too quickly, but he has notes he must get back to, and the walk to the hardware store has cost him the better part of the afternoon already.

“Are you sure? I could make us some coffee.”

He nods to show that yes, he is sure, and “It’s in the Southern Hemisphere,” he says. She looks confused again, and he recognizes the familiar patience in her confusion, the patience that shines coolly from her whenever she doesn’t immediately understand something he’s said.

“Sextens,” he says. “The Sextant constellation. The Rat’s Star,” and now there’s the vaguest glint of comprehension in her, surfacing slow like something coming up from deep water for a breath of air. “I didn’t know if you knew that. If you knew much about astronomy,” he says.

“No, I didn’t know that, Olan. That could be interesting. I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ever made that connection before,” and now she’s staring back down at the padlock like maybe she’s just noticed it for the first time. 

“There are three actually,” he says. “Three stars in an isosceles triangle, like this,” and Olan tries to show her with his hands, geometry of thumb against thumb, the intersection of index fingers. “Like a ship’s sextant,” he adds.

“That could be very helpful to know.”

“I have books, if you ever need them.” He’s already turning away from her, can sense that he’s made her uneasy, has spent plenty enough years making people uneasy to see the signs. “I have a lot of books on stars, if you ever need any of them. I know you take good care of books.”

And she says, “Thanks,” as he walks away towards his own apartment door at the other end of the hall. “And thanks for the lock, too, Olan,” she says, like an afterthought.

On one wall he has taken down twenty-seven index cards, accounts of living things found encased in solid stone, toads and worms mostly, and he has written live evil where the cards were. Two elements of the palindrome taken out of context and reconnected, like rat’s star. Sometimes the truth is easier to see when things are disassembled and put back together another way. That’s what The Academic does, he thinks, takes apart the words of dead women and puts them together differently, trying to find the truth hidden inside lines of poetry. That’s what he does with his books and newspapers.

Now Olan lies in the dark on his springshot mattress that smells like sweat and tobacco smoke and maybe piss, too, and the only light is coming in through the window above his head, falling in a crooked rectangle on the opposite wall, so he can read LIVE EVIL where he took down the cards.

He lies still, listening to the building and the city outside, and he thinks: there is never any getting closer to the truth, no matter what you write on paper cards or plaster walls, no matter how you rearrange the words. Because the truth is like the horizon, relative to where you’re standing, and it moves if you move. And he thinks that he should get up and turn on a lamp and write that in one of his notebooks, that he might forget it before morning. Then he hears the sound: broomsticks thumping on the stairs, that staccato wooden quality to the sound, broomsticks or stilts maybe, and he remembers the long-legged thing from the train tracks the night before. He wonders if its long legs might not make that sound coming up the stairs. His heart is beating faster, listening, as the sound gets closer, not on the stairs any longer, thump, thump, thumping in the hallway, instead. But far down at the other end, near The Academic’s door, not his, and he lies very, very still hoping that she has done what she said, that she has put the extra lock on her door. 

And then he realizes that there is another kind of noise, fainter, but worse to hear, a wet and snuffling sort of noise, like something sniffing along the floor, or at the narrow crack beneath a closed door. A purposeful, searching noise, and he stares across the shadow-filled room towards the door, getting cold from his own sour sweat despite the radiator. In a few minutes, the snuffling noise stops and the thumping begins again, as whatever’s in the hall moves on to the next door down.

“I don’t hear it,” Olan whispers, and he hides his face in his pillow and waits for daylight.

Morning like clotted milk hanging in the sky, and Jessie, her arms loaded with overdue library books stacked up to her chin, dreading the cold outside and the bus ride to school. Jangle of her key ring in the quiet hallway: key for the doorknob and the dead bolt and the door out to the street, key to the laundry room and mailbox, one more for her shabby little office at the university; all hung together on a shiny loop of brass and a tarnished brass tab with her initials engraved there, a Christmas gift five years old from a now-dead father. It’s a sideshow contortionist trick, locking the door, shifting the books, and the one on top slides off,
The World Into Words
falling to the dusty floor. Jessie leaves the keying dangling in the lock and stoops to retrieve the fallen book, cursing loudly when the rest of the stack almost tumbles over as well, but she catches them by leaning quickly forward against the door.

“
Fuck,
” she says, hard and angry whisper, and her breath fogs in the cold air. It’s too fucking early for this shit. She rests her forehead against the wood, swallows, pushing down the camera-flash of rage, knows that she’s overreacting, knows that’s what her shrink would say.

And then, looking down, she sees the marks in the door, the deep gouges near the floor, and for a second she thinks it’s just something that has always been there and she never noticed, that’s all. But there are splinters on the floor, too, old wood freshly broken, and a fresh scatter of scaly paint flakes the color of bile. And, the last thing she notices, a faint, unpleasant smell, lingering in the heavy cold, smell like a wet dog and something gone bad at the back of a refrigerator, smell like animal and mildew and mushrooms.

“Jesus,” not bothering to whisper anymore. “Jesus H. Christ.” She carefully sets the books on the floor and explores one of the gouges with the tip of a finger, the rough and violated wood sharp against her soft skin. Jessie turns and looks down the hall, and there are similar marks on other doors, and a wide diagonal slash across Olan’s so big that she can see it all the way from her end. She shivers, not a cold shiver, but a prickling at the back of her neck, short-hair tingle down her arms at the sight of each of the doors with their own individual scars. But all of them are closed, no sign that whoever made the gouges actually managed to break into a single one of the apartments.

Jessie locks her door, thinking of the gift from Olan, unopened and lying useless on her coffee table.
It’s a rough neighborhood,
he said, and she picks up her books again, more attention to balance this time. She tries not to think about junkie with crowbars, crackheads with tire irons wandering the building while she slept, shit like that. When she gets home she’ll dig out a screwdriver and hammer and put Olan’s shiny new padlock on the door.

A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. 

But the dimmest of possibilities – he may himself become Truth.

Charles Fort,
The Book of the Damned
(1919)

Rats Live on No Evil Star

Because in Birmingham I did watch the sky far too much, and sometimes there were things there. The stick dogs, they’ve been with me almost forever, and likely always shall be. Oh, and Charles Fort, of course. And Anne Sexton. And all damned things.

Salmagundi

(New York City, 1981)

Elgin is sipping his second beer and watching the empty space past the footlights that haven’t been turned on yet, matte-black plywood hole hardly big enough to call a stage, small by even the frugal standards he’s gotten used to the last two years; these two years frantically divvied between New York and LA, Seattle and San Francisco, watching, interviewing, writing up everything from guerrilla street theater to post-feminist performance art for
The Village Voice
and anyone else who will pay him enough to pretend this is journalism. Fuck that, just anyone willing to publish what he says, what
they
say to him. Tonight, and this piece for
RE/Search,
for a volume on industrial culture. He looks at the flyer again, torn off a telephone pole on Bleecker Street. Paper the color of a blood stain, maybe, or a ketchup stain, at least, and the sort of cut-up art he would have expected – violent, disconnected images from anonymous sources, and hand-printed across the top, “Salmagundi” and a date and an hour and the address of this place where a rat would think twice about taking a dump. SubAllegory, the sign above the door says, though that wasn’t on the flyer.

Elgin folds the ragged piece of red paper and stuffs it back into his shirt pocket. His beer is warm and tastes like something made from fermented cornflakes.

And then the lights come up, dazzling sudden white in the smoke and gloom, and so now it is a stage, or at least a place where something is about to happen, so it’ll have to do. The murmuring crowd jammed into SubAllegory stops murmuring, and their heads turn, their eyes turn, as the eyes of one hungry multibodied organism turning to see, starving and maybe in a moment there will be something edible offered up. But there’s only a mountain of bone, jackstraw pyramid of carefully balanced and interlocked femora and skulls, ribs and dry shoulder blades; mostly cow and pig, Elgin guesses, maybe some sheep, bone trash gathered from local meat packers and butchers. He has his stenographer’s pad and his pencil, and he’s long since learned to make notes in the dark, graphite scrawl he can decipher later in brighter places.

There are other things, suspended by metal wire or nylon fishing line and hooks, crimson-gray chunks of meat and organs – a heart, a liver, a length of oyster-violet intestine – all these suspended at varying heights, hung to form a rough and floating mandala about the bones. And now that he thinks about it, Elgin realizes that he can smell the meat, old blood and a faint hint of rot in the cold basement air of the place – “a faint odor like fetid subtext,” he writes quickly without taking his eyes off the stage.