Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (24 page)

Past the hadrosauri and across a small hillock, the snaky teal-and-cream neck of a plesiosaur rises, swan-elegant, from the lagoon. Jherek closes his eyes, content with the moment, the luxury of the Palaeozoic Museum and its treasures, the company of the strange and displaced girl.

“I cannot say that it is unpleasant, though,” she says, whispering almost too quietly for him to hear, Jherek drifting, considering sleep. “The warmth,” she says.

Following Jagged’s careful directions, the Iron Orchid comes, ethereal hematite and lady of petals and gold-dust pollen, finally, to the Palaeozoic Museum. She twists one zircon ring to tint her eyes against the sudden bright, then stands a moment at the rail, admiring the craftsmanship, the impeccable balance of restoration and imagination, that would have given away the Museum’s authorship, if she’d not known already. After the unrelenting glower of My Lady Charlotina’s party (“Twelve-hundred
distinct
shades of grey,” Werther de Goethe bragged, betraying his hand in the whole ill-considered affair), after the endless “entertainments,” consisting entirely of wearisome demonstrations of embalming and mummification techniques, the fragrant air and vibrance of this garden makes her feel clean again.

“Carnelian?” she calls, not seeing Jherek, but is answered only by the grunts and chirrups of the Museum’s exhibits. She suspects, at first, that he is playing a game with her, hide-and-seek or qwerty zotz, but finds him easily enough a moment later, asleep on a little bridge near the entrance. And the darkly-clothed girl child, one of My Lady Charlotina’s props, no doubt, snoring softly at his side. The girl’s skin, alien to the sun, has turned a bright carnation hue of red. 

An improvement, surely, the Iron Orchid thinks, as she lifts Jherek in her gleaming arms. He stirs, a gentle dream noise from his slightly parted lips.

“Loveliest Jherek,” she says. She kisses his forehead, walks away from the sleeping, dowdy, sun-burned child of the Four Year Empire. “Even forever will seem too short, with you to spend it with.”

Behind her, Jagged’s garden, exquisite tapestry of anachronisms, ages stitched together like wounded soldiers, whispers and screams as they leave. 

If all time is eternally present,

 All time is unredeemable.

T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (1935 – 1936)

Giants in the Earth

An oddity of the early years of my career, the “tie-in” anthology, playing in other people’s sandboxes. Here, it was Michael Moorcock’s
Dancers
At the End of Time
, and this may or may not make sense to you if you’ve not read those books. But I love the way I fit he words together, and this impossible, decadent, distant future which so misunderstands the past (as always we do). So, here’s my tribute to Moorcock, and also to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and the stillborn Palaeozoic Museum that should, to this day, stand in Central Park. This story takes place before Moorcock’s
An Alien Heat
(1971). Also, never confuse mesosaurs (Mesosauria) and mosasaurs (Squamata).

Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire

1

In this absence of others

There is not the peace we’re led

To believe in like Sunday school

I cannot hear for the roar This wind

Has me half-deaf Good as that

Or more

Nothing has been restored Things fall apart and That’s the way

They stay 

Nothing to be learned except edges slice and

Children take apart because

They can and cry at the mess

They’ve made Oh

Look to Father for the glue (which is Heaven)

To mother for licking wounds (which is this

Brooding shade with crystal wrists) Oh

2

Ugly lines of paper houses

The sky is never dark

And the stars forget themselves

We are pink eyes in cages

3

Our lives are not innocent

Any more than they can be romantic;

The long red century has laid dull stone

Between us and any finer attribute.

We have buried what we might have known of

Such things,

Sown the graves with salt and indifference

That nothing might grow there ever again

Except dim and orphaned memory.

There are words we cannot even write,

Or speak, for the forgetting of their sincerity.

Eggshell and no

Royal restoration. 

These fragments shored

For you, and I finally see for you alone. 

October 12, 1995 – July 20, 1999

Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire

I don’t write much poetry. Too many reasons to go into. This one was the first I thought was good enough to show anyone, the first I would allow to be published. Here’s many years I lived and survived, condensed, distilled into a few stanzas.

PART TWO

2000 – 2004

Spindleshanks

(New Orleans, 1956)

The end of July, indolent, dog-day swelter inside the big white house on Prytania Street; Greek Revival columns painted as cool and white as a vanilla ice cream cone, and from the second-floor verandah Reese can see right over the wall into Lafayette Cemetery, if she wants to – Lafayette No 1, and the black iron letters above the black iron gate to remind anyone who forgets. She doesn’t dislike the house, not the way that she began to dislike her apartment in Boston before she finally left, but it’s much too big, even with Emma, and so far she hasn’t even bothered to take the sheets off most of the furniture downstairs. This one bedroom almost more than they need, anyway, her typewriter and the electric fan from Woolworth’s on the table by the wide French doors to the verandah, so she can sit there all day, sip her gin and tonic and stare out at the whitewashed brick walls and the crypts whenever the words aren’t coming.

And these days the words are hardly ever coming, hardly ever there when she goes looking for them, and her editor wanted the novel finished two months ago. Running from that woman and her shiny black patent pumps, her fashionable hats, as surely as she ran from Boston, the people there she was tired of listening to, and so Reese Callicott leased this big white house for the summer and didn’t tell anyone where she was going or why. Still, she might have looked for a house in Vermont or Connecticut, instead, if she’d stopped to take the heat seriously, but the whole summer paid for in advance, all the way through September, and there’s no turning back now. Nothing now but cracked ice and Gilbey’s and her view of the cemetery; her mornings and afternoons sitting at the typewriter and the mocking blank white paper, sweat and the candy smell of magnolias all day long, then jasmine at night.

Emma’s noisy little parties at night, too, all night sometimes, the motley handful of people she drags in like lost puppies and scatters throughout the big house on Prytania Street; this man a philosophy or religion student at Tulane and that woman a poet from somewhere lamentable in Mississippi, that fellow a friend of a friend of Faulkner or Capote. Their accents and pretenses and the last of them hanging around until almost dawn unless Reese finds the energy to run them off sooner. But energy is in shorter supply than the words these days, and mostly she just leaves them alone, lets them play their jazz and Fats Domino records too loud and have the run of the place because it makes Emma happy. No point in denying that she feels guilty for dragging poor Emma all the way to New Orleans, making her suffer the heat and mosquitoes because Chapter Eight of
The Ecstatic River
might as well be a cinder-block wall.

Reese lights a cigarette and blows the smoke towards the verandah, towards the cemetery, and a hot breeze catches it and quickly drags her smoke ghost to pieces.

“There’s a party in the Quarter tonight,” Emma says. She’s lying on the bed, four o’clock Friday afternoon and she’s still wearing her butteryellow house coat, lying in bed with one of her odd books and a glass of bourbon and lemonade.

“Isn’t there always a party in the Quarter?” Reese asks, and now she’s watching two old women in the cemetery, one with a bouquet of white flowers. She thinks they’re chrysanthemums, but the women are too far away for her to be sure.

“Well, yes. Of course. But this one’s going to be something different. I think a real voodoo woman will be there.” A pause and she adds, “You should come.”

“You know I have too much work.”

Reese doesn’t have to turn around in her chair to know the pout on Emma’s face, the familiar, exaggerated disappointment, and she suspects that it doesn’t actually matter to Emma whether or not she comes to the party. But this ritual is something that has to be observed, the way old women have to bring flowers to the graves of relatives who died a hundred years ago, the way she has to spend her days staring at blank pages.

“It might help – with your writing, I mean – if you got out once in a while. Really, sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.”

“I talk to people, Emma. I talked to that Mr. …” and she has to stop, searching for his name, and there it is, “That Mr. Leonard, just the other night. You know, the fat one with the antique shop.”

“He’s almost
sixty
years old,” Emma says. Reese takes another drag off her cigarette, exhales, and “Well, it’s not like you want me out looking for a husband,” she replies.

“Have it your way,” Emma says, the way she always says,
Have it your way
, and she goes back to her book, and Reese goes back to staring at the obstinate typewriter and watching the dutiful old women on the other side of the high cemetery wall.

Reese awakens from a nightmare a couple of hours before dawn, awake and sweating and breathless, chilled by a breeze through the open verandah doors. Emma’s fast asleep beside her, lying naked on top of the sheets, though Reese didn’t hear her come in. If she cried out or made any other noises in her sleep, at least it doesn’t seem to have disturbed Emma. Reese stares at the verandah a moment, the night beyond, and then she sits up, both feet on the floor, and she reaches for the lamp cord. But that might wake Emma, and it
was
only a nightmare after all, a bad dream, and in a minute or two it will all seem at least as absurd as her last novel.

Instead she lights a cigarette and sits smoking in the dark, listening to the restless sounds the big house makes when everyone is still and quiet and it’s left to its own devices, its random creaks and thumps, solitary house thoughts and memories filtered through plaster and lathe and burnished oak. The mumbling house and the exotic, piping song of a night bird somewhere outside, mundane birdsong made exotic because she hasn’t spent her whole life hearing it, some bird that doesn’t fly as far north as Boston. Reese listens to the bird and the settling house, and to Emma’s soft snores, while she smokes the cigarette almost down to the filter, and then she gets up, walks across the wide room to the verandah doors, only meaning to close them. Only meaning to shut out a little of the night, and then maybe she can get back to sleep. 

But she pauses halfway, distracted by the book on Emma’s nightstand, a very old book, by the look of it, something else borrowed from one or another of her Royal Street acquaintances, no doubt. More bayou superstition, Negro tales of voodoo and swamp magic, zombies and grave-robbing, the bogeyman passed off as folklore, and Reese squints to read the cover, fine leather worn by ages of fingers and the title stamped in flaking crimson –
Cultes des Goules
by François Honore-Balfour, Comte d’Erlette. The whole volume in French, and the few grim illustrations do nothing for Reese’s nerves, so she sets it back down on the table, making a mental note to ask Emma what she sees in such morbid things, and, by the way, why hasn’t she ever mentioned that she can read French?

The verandah doors half shut, and Reese pauses, looks out at the little city of the dead across the street, the marble and cement roofs dull white by the light of the setting half moon, and a small shred of the dream comes back to her then. Emma, the day they met, a snowy December afternoon in Harvard Square, Reese walking fast past the Old Burying Ground and First Church, waiting in the cold for her train, and Emma standing off in the distance. Dark silhouette against the drifts and the white flakes swirling around her, and Reese tries to think what could possibly have been so frightening about any of that. Some minute detail already fading when she opened her eyes, something about the sound of the wind in the trees, maybe, or a line of footprints in the snow between her and Emma. Reese Callicott stares at Lafayette for a few more minutes, and then she closes the verandah doors, locks them, and goes back to bed.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Emma says and frowns as she pours a shot of whiskey into her glass of lemonade. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe they found her right down there on the sidewalk, and we slept straight through the whole thing.”

“Well, there might not have been that much noise,” Carlton says helpfully and sips at his own drink, bourbon on the rocks, and he takes off his hat and sets it on the imported wicker table in the center of the verandah. Carlton, the only person in New Orleans that Reese would think to call her friend, dapper, middle-aged man with a greying mustache and his Big Easy accent. Someone that she met at a writer’s conference in Providence years ago, before Harper finally bought
The Light Beyond Center
and her short stories started selling to
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic
. Carlton the reason she’s spending the summer in exile in the house on Prytania Street, because it belongs to a painter friend of his who’s away in Spain or Portugal or some place like that.