Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (10 page)

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 can not 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 can not 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.

III.

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 Pacific and the sun coming up over the town where it huddles at the crumbling western 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 here, 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. “Now, 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?
I 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 you begin to miss the old man’s cock between you 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.
You 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 you from a life spent peddling pussy and Clark Stanley’s snake 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 alienists.” 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 would be enough to still the mad somersault of her words. “Though I was only an infant,” she 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’s begun to believe (or at least
wishes
to believe) in her own canard. “No matter,” 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.

“Again? But I should think you’d have the damned thing memorized by now.”

I stop rubbing at my aching head and hold out my left hand to her.
Give it to me,
I say, and she narrows her grey eyes suspiciously, as I’ve never once before
asked
to see the stone, and it isn’t like me to deviate from the confines of the events and dialogue which she has scripted so meticulously. Possibly, she begins to suspect the unthinkable, rebellion from her wooden puppet, and must wonder if she’s allowed me too much string, too much slack upon my tethers. I half expect her to turn away again, to seek such refuge as might be had in the cracked dressing-table mirror or to walk out the door and leave me alone in my dingy room. Instead, she nods her head and places the peculiar stone into my outstretched hand.

…and there would be no mention anywhere of her tiresome fairy stories or my deceitful, subjective desires.

I would reduce her to the driest of crystallographies.

The stone is not quite round and is somewhat flattened side to side, the approximate colour of licorice, and I tell her what I’ve already told her before, that it’s only a beach cobble, a bit of Mesozoic slate fallen from the headlands or the high cliffs surrounding the harbour, then polished smooth by time and the ocean. I describe its mineral composition for her – muscovite and quartz, with small quantities of biotite, pyrite, and hematite, and perhaps also traces of kaolin and tourmaline. But I have said repeatedly that it is a
peculiar
stone, have I not, and none of these things make it peculiar in the least. “What else?” she asks. A flurry of minute snowflakes escapes her lips, borne upon her voice and blown towards me on her Siberian breath, and they look nothing at all like fat white geese. “What is there about it that I
couldn’t
learn from the pages of one of your schoolbooks?” It grows so heavy in my hand then, her stone, as though it has suddenly trebled or quadrupled in size while appearing just exactly the same as always.
It is a sympathetic stone,
I say to her, surprising myself, and she takes a quick step backwards and bumps hard against a corner of the dressing table.
What?
I ask.
Did you believe we’d never get this far?
But she only looks afraid and doesn’t answer me. And I understand now, at last, that the wizard’s daughter is as surely a puppet as am I. She is frozen to her core, kneeling in an alpine meadow, trapped forever in the icy shadow of an old man’s despite. It does not matter whether these things are literally true or only figurative. It does not matter, either, what I can and can not believe, or whether I am sane.
A sympathetic stone,
I say again, and the snow from her lips settles in my hair and on the harsh angles of my face.
These markings scratched into its surface, I can’t read those, but I suspect that’s not important. It isn’t what we can see in this stone, but what this stone can see in us. Are you following me?
She licks her lips nervously, and they sparkle with the thinnest sheen of frozen saliva.
That’s its genius, you see. It truly is a looking glass.
She rubs at her hip where it struck the dressing table and laughs the driest, most unconvincing laugh that I have ever heard. “You think me simple, an imbecile, is that it? Do you think you might gain the upper hand, and your freedom, too, with only a quick-witted riddle and a straight face? My father –”
But that was such a very long time ago,
I say, interrupting her.
Long ago and far away, in a country I have never visited outside your dreams.