Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (32 page)

“People are always listening,” he says, whenever Frank has suggested or asked that they meet somewhere without an entrance fee. “You never know what they might overhear.”

So sometimes it’s the long marble bench in front of the
Apatosaurus
, or the abyssal blue-black gloom of the Hall of Fishes, seats beneath a planetarium-constellation sky, whichever spot happens to strike Sidney’s fancy that particular day. His fancy or his cabalistic fantasies, if there’s any difference. Today Frank finds him in the Hall of Asiatic Mammals, this short and rumpled man in a worn-out tweed jacket and red tennis shoes standing alone before the Indian leopard diorama, gazing intently in at the pocket of counterfeit jungle and the taxidermied cats. Frank waits behind him for a minute or two, waiting to be noticed, and when Sidney looks up and speaks, he speaks to Frank’s reflection in the glass.

“I’m very busy today,” he says, brusque, impatient. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”

And no, Frank says, it won’t take long at all, I promise, but Sidney’s doubtful expression to show just how much he believes that. He sighs and looks back to the stuffed leopards, papier-mâché trees and wax leaves, a painted flock of peafowl rising to hang forever beneath a painted forest canopy. Snapshot moment of another world. The walls of the dimly-lit hall lined with a dozen or more such scenes. 

“You want to know about Monalisa,” Sidney says. “That’s why you came here, because you think I can tell you who he is.”

“Yeah,” Frank admits and reaches into his pocket for his wallet. “He came into the place where I work last week and left this.” He takes out the card, and Sidney turns around only long enough to snatch it from him.

“So, you talked to him?”

“No, I didn’t. I was eating my lunch in the stockroom. I didn’t actually see him for myself.”

Sidney stares at the card. He seems to read it carefully three or four times, and then he hands it back to Frank and goes back to staring at the leopards.

“Why didn’t you show this to Zaroba?” he asks sarcastically, tauntingly, but Frank answers him anyway, not in the mood today for Sidney’s grudges and intrigues.

“Because I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. You know he’s more interested in the mysteries than ever finding answers.” Frank pauses, silent for a moment, and Sidney’s silent, too, both men watching the big cats now – glass eyes, freeze-frame talons, and taut, spectacled haunches – as though the leopards might suddenly spring towards them, all this stillness just a clever ruse for the tourists and the kiddies. Maybe dead leopards know the nervous, wary faces of men who have seen things that they never should have seen.

“He knows the truth would swallow him whole,” Sidney says. The leopards don’t pounce, and he adds, “He knows he’s a coward.”

“So who is Dr. Monalisa?”

“A bit of something the truth already swallowed and spat back up,” and Sidney chuckles sourly to himself and produces one of his pipes from a pocket of the tweed jacket. “He thinks himself a navigator, a pilot, a cartographer…”

Frank notices that one of the two leopards has captured a stuffed peacock, holds it fast between velvet, razored paws, and he can’t remember if it was that way only a moment before. 

“He draws maps,” Sidney says. “He catalogs doors and windows and culverts.”

“That’s bullshit,” Frank whispers, his voice low now so the old woman staring in at the giant panda exhibit won’t hear him. “You’re trying to tell me he can
find
places?”

“He isn’t a sane man, Frank,” Sidney says, and now he holds up his left hand and presses his palm firmly against the glass, as if he’s testing the invisible barrier, gauging its integrity. “He has answers, but he has prices, too. You think
this
is Hell, you wait and see how it feels to be in debt to Dr. Solomon Monalisa.”

“It isn’t me. It’s Willa. I think she’s starting to lose it.”

“We all lost
it
a long time ago, Frank.”

“I’m afraid she’s going to do something. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.”

And Sidney turns his back on the leopards, then, takes the pipe from his mouth, and glares up at Frank. But some of the anger, some of the bitterness, has gone from his eyes.

“He
might
keep her alive,” he says, “but you wouldn’t want her back when he was done. If she’d even
come
back. No, Frank. You two stay away from Monalisa. Look for your own answers. You don’t think you found that card by accident, do you? You don’t really think there are such things as coincidences?
That’s
not even his real address – ”

“She can’t sleep anymore,” Frank says, but now Sidney McAvoy isn’t listening. He glances back over his shoulder at the Indian rain forest, incandescent daylight, illusory distances. “I have to go now,” he says abruptly. “I’m very busy today.”

“I think she’s fucking
dying
, man,” Franks says as Sidney straightens his tie and puts the pipe back into his pocket; the old woman looks up from the panda in its unreal bamboo thicket and frowns at them both.

“I’m very busy today, Frank. Call me next week. I think I can meet you at the Guggenheim next week.”

And he walks quickly away towards the Roosevelt Rotunda, past the Siberian tiger and the Sumatran rhinoceros, leaving Frank alone with the frowning woman. When Sidney has vanished into the shadows behind a small herd of Indian elephants, Frank turns back to the leopards and the smudgy handprint Sidney McAvoy has left on their glass. There are the prints of six fingers.

Hours and hours later, past sunset to the other side of the wasted day, the night that seems even hotter than the scorching afternoon, and Frank is dreaming that the crack in the basement wall on St. Mark’s Place is much too narrow for him to squeeze through. Maybe that’s the way it really happened after all, and then he hears a small, anguished sound from somewhere close behind him, something hurting or lost, but when he turns to see, Frank opens his eyes, and there’s only the tangerine glow of the noodle shop sign outside the apartment window. He blinks once, twice, but this stubborn world doesn’t go away, doesn’t break apart into random kaleidoscopic shards to become some other place entirely. So he sits up, head full of familiar disappointment, this incontestable solidity, and it takes him a moment to realize that Willa isn’t in bed. Faint outline of her body left in the wrinkled sheets, and the bathroom light is burning, the door open, so she’s probably just taking a piss.

“You okay in there?” he calls out, but no reply. The soft drip, drip, drip of the kitchenette faucet, tick of the wind-up alarm clock on the table next to Willa’s side of the bed, street noise, but no answer. “Did you fall in or something?” he asks. “Did you drown?”

And still no response, but his senses are waking up, picking out more than the ordinary, every-night sounds, a trilling whine pitched so high he feels it more than hears it, and now he notices the way that the air in the apartment smells.

Go back to sleep,
he thinks.
When you wake up again, it’ll be over.
But both legs are already over the edge of the bed, both feet already on the dusty floor. 

The trill is worming its way beneath his skin, soaking in, pricking gently at the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. All the silver fillings in his teeth have begun to hum along sympathetically. Where he’s standing, Frank can see into the bathroom, just barely, a narrow slice of linoleum, slice of porcelain toilet tank, a mildew and polyurethane fold of shower curtain. And he thinks that the air has started to shimmer, an almost imperceptible warping of the light escaping from the open door, but that might only be his imagination. He takes one small step towards the foot of the bed, and there’s Willa, standing naked before the tiny mirror above the bathroom sink. The sharp jut of her shoulder blades and hip bones, the anorexic swell of her ribcage, all the minute details of her painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh and curving light.

“Hey. Is something wrong? Are you sick” She turns her head slowly to look at him, or maybe only looking towards him because there’s nothing much like recognition on her face. Her wide, unblinking eyes, blind woman’s stare.

“Can’t you hear me, Willa?” he asks as she turns slowly back to the mirror. Her lips move, shaping rough, inaudible words.

The trilling noise grows infinitesimally louder, climbs another half-octave. There’s a warm, wet trickle across Frank’s lips, and he realizes that his nose is bleeding.

Behind Willa the bathroom wall, the shower, the low ceiling – everything – ripples and dissolves, and there’s a sudden, staccato
pop
as the bulb above the sink shatters. After an instant of perfect darkness, perfect nothing, there are dull and yellow-green shafts of light from somewhere far, far above, flickering light from an alien sun shining down through the waters of an alien sea. Dim, translucent shapes dart and flash through those depths, bodies more insubstantial than jellyfish, more sinuous than eels, and Willa rises to meet them, arms outstretched, her hair drifting about her face like a halo of seaweed and algae. In the ocean-filtered light, Willa’s pale skin seems sleek and smooth as dolphin flesh. Air rushes from her lips, her nostrils, and flows eagerly away in a glassy swirl of bubbles.

The trilling has filled Frank’s head so full, and his aching skull, his brain, seem only an instant from merciful implosion, the fragile, eggshell bone collapsed by the terrible, lonely sound and the weight of all that water stacked above him. He staggers, takes a step backwards, and now Willa’s face is turned up to meet the sunlight streaming down, and she’s more beautiful than anyone or anything he’s ever seen or dreamt.

Down on Mott Street, the screech of tires, the angry blat of a car horn, and someone begins shouting very loudly in Mandarin.

And now the bathroom is only a bathroom again, and Willa lies in a limp, strangling heap on the floor, her wet hair and skin glistening in the light from the unbroken bulb above the sink. The water rolls off her back, her thighs, spreading across the floor in a widening puddle, and Frank realizes that the trilling has finally stopped, only the memory of it left in his ringing ears and bleeding nose. When the dizziness has passed, he goes to her, sits down on the wet floor and holds her while she coughs and pukes up gouts of saltwater and snotty strands of something the color of verdigris. Her skin is so cold it hurts to touch, cold coming off her like an inverted fever, and something small and chitinous slips from her hair and scuttles away behind the toilet on long and jointed legs.

“Did you
see
?” she asks him, desperate, rheumy words gurgling out with all the water that she’s swallowed. “Did you, Frank? Did you
see
it?”

“Yes,” he tells her, just like every time before. “Yes, baby. I did. I saw it all.” Willa smiles, closes her eyes, and in a little while she’s asleep. He carries her, dripping, back to their bed and holds her until the sun rises, and she’s warm again.

The next day neither of them goes to work, and some small, niggling part of Frank manages to worry about what will happen to them if he loses the shit job at Gotham Kwick Kopy, if Willa gets fired from the cafe, that obstinate shred of himself still capable of caring about such things. How the rent will be paid, how they’ll eat, everything that hasn’t really seemed to matter in more years than he wants to count. He spends half the morning in bed. His nosebleed keeps coming back, a roll of toilet paper and then one of their towels stained all the shades of dried and drying blood; Willa wearing her winter coat despite the heat, and she keeps trying to get him to go to a doctor, but no, he says. That might lead to questions, and besides, it’ll stop sooner or later. It’s always stopped before. 

By twelve o’clock, Willa’s traded the coat for her pink cardigan and feels good enough that she makes them peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, black coffee and stale potato chips, and after he eats Frank begins to feel better, too. But going to the park is Willa’s idea, because the apartment still smells faintly of silt and dead fish, muddy, low-tide stink that’ll take hours more to disappear completely. He knows the odor makes her nervous, so he agrees, even though he’d rather spend the afternoon sleeping off his headache. Maybe have a cold shower, another cup of Willa’s bitterstrong coffee, and if he’s lucky he could doze for hours without dreaming.

They take the subway up to Fifth, follow the eastern edge of the park north, past the zoo and East Green all the way to Pilgrim Hill and the Conservatory Pond. It’s not so very hot that there aren’t a few model sailing ships on the pond, just enough breeze to keep their miniature Bermuda sails standing tall and taut as shark fins. Frank and Willa sit in the shade near the Alice in Wonderland statue, her favorite spot in all of Central Park, the rocky place near the tea party, granite and rustling leaves, the clean laughter of children climbing about on the huge bronze mushrooms. A little girl with frizzy black hair and red and white peppermint-striped tights is petting the kitten in Alice’s lap, stroking its metal fur and meow-
ling loudly.

“I can’t ever remember her name,” Willa says.

“What?” Franks asks. “Whose name?” not sure if she means the little girl or the kitten or something else entirely.

“Alice’s kitten. I know it had a name, but I never can remember it.”

Frank watches the little girl for a moment. “Dinah,” he says. “I think the kitten’s name was Dinah.”

“Oh, yeah, Dinah. That’s it,” and he knows that she’s just thinking out loud, whatever comes to mind so that she won’t have to talk about last night, so the conversation won’t accidentally find its own way back to those few drowning moments of chartreuse light and eel shadows. She’s trying so hard to pretend, and he almost decides they’re both better off if he plays along and doesn’t show her Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s white calling card. 

“That’s a good name for a cat,” she says. “If we ever get a kitten, I think I’ll name it Dinah.”

“Mrs. Wu doesn’t like cats.”