Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (13 page)

Don’t let it end,
he prays to the sea, whom he has faith can hear the prayers of all her supplicants and will answer those she deems worthy.
Let it go on and on and on. Let it never end.

He clenches his fists, digging his short nails deep into the skin of his palms, and bites his lip so hard that he tastes blood. And the taste of those few drops of his own life is not so very different from holding the sea inside his mouth.

At last, I have done a perfect thing,
he tells himself, himself and the sea and the ammonites and the lingering souls of all his suffocations.
So many years, so much time, so much work and money, but finally I have done this one perfect thing.
And then he opens his eyes again, and also he opens the top middle drawer of his desk and takes out the revolver that once belonged to his father, who was a Gloucester fisherman who somehow managed never to collect anything at all.

Her fingers and the bow dance wild across the strings, and in only a few minutes Ellen has lost herself inside the giddy tangle of harmonics and drones and double stops, and if ever she has felt magic –
true
magic – in her art, then she feels it now. She lets her eyes drift from the music stand and the printed pages, because it is all right there behind her eyes and burning on her fingertips. She might well have written these lines herself and then spent half her life playing at nothing else, they rush through her with such ease and confidence. This is ecstasy, and this is abandon, and this is the tumble and roar of a thousand other emotions she seems never to have fully felt before this night. The strange violin no longer seems unusually heavy; in fact, it hardly seems to have any weight at all.

Perhaps there is no violin,
she thinks.
Perhaps there never was a violin, only my hands and empty air, and that’s all it takes to make music like this.

Language is language is language,
the fat man said, and so these chords have become her words. No, not words, but something so much less indirect than the clumsy interplay of her tongue and teeth, larynx and palate. They have become, simply, her language, as they ever have been. Her soul speaking to the world, and all the world need do in return is
listen.

She shuts her eyes, no longer requiring them to grasp the progression from one note to the next, and at first there is only the comfortable darkness behind her lids, which seems better matched to the music than all the distractions of her eyes.

Don’t let it stop,
she thinks, not praying, unless this is a prayer to herself, for the violinist has never seen the need for gods.
Please, let it be like this forever. Let this moment never end, and I will never have to stop playing, and there will never again be silence or the noise of human thoughts and conversation.

It can’t be that way, Ellen,
her sister whispers, not whispering in her ear, but from somewhere within the Paganini concerto, or from within the ammonite violin, or both at once.
I wish I could give you that. I would give you that, if it were mine to give
.

And then Ellen sees, or hears, or simply
understands
in this language which is
her
language, as language is language is language, the fat man’s hands about her sister’s throat. Her sister dying somewhere cold near the sea, dying all alone except for the company of her murderer, and there is half an instant when she almost stops playing.

No
, her sister whispers, and that one word comes like a blazing gash across the concerto’s whirl. Ellen doesn’t stop playing, and she doesn’t open her eyes, and she watches as her lost sister slowly dies.

The music is a typhoon gale flaying rocky shores to gravel and sand, and the violinist lets it spin and rage, and she watches as the fat man takes four of her sister’s fingers and part of a thighbone, strands of her ash-blonde hair, a vial of oil boiled and distilled from the fat of her breasts, a pink-white section of small intestine – all these things and the five fossils from off an English beach to make the instrument he wooed her here to play for him. And now there are tears streaming hot down her cheeks, but still Ellen plays the violin that was her sister, and still she doesn’t open her eyes.

The single gunshot is very loud in the room, and the display cases rattle, and a few of the ammonites slip off their Lucite stands and clatter against wood or glass or other spiraled shells.

And finally the violinist opens her eyes.

And the music ends as the bow slides from her fingers and falls to the floor at her feet.

“No,” she says, “please don’t let it stop, please,” but the echo of the revolver and the memory of the concerto are so loud in her ears that her own words are almost lost to her.

That’s all,
her sister whispers, louder than any suicide’s gun, soft as a midwinter night coming on, gentle as one unnoticed second bleeding into the next
. I’ve shown you, and now there isn’t any more.

Across the room, the Collector still sits at his desk, but now he’s slumped a bit in his chair, and his head is thrown back so that he seems to be staring at something on the ceiling. Blood spills from the black cavern of his open mouth and drips to the floor.

There isn’t any more.

And when she’s stopped crying and is quite certain that her sister will not speak to her again, that all the secrets she has any business seeing have been revealed, the violinist retrieves the dropped bow and stands, then walks to the desk and returns the ammonite violin to its case. She will not give it to the police when they arrive, after she has gone to the kitchen to call them, and she will not tell them that it was the fat man who gave it to her. She will take it back to Brooklyn, and they will find other incriminating things in another room in the yellow house and so have no need of the violin and these stolen shreds of her sister. The Collector has kindly written everything down in three books bound in red leather, all the names and dates and places, and there are other souvenirs, besides. And she will never try to put this story into words, for words have never come easily to her, and like the violin, the story is hers now and hers alone.

For Robin Hazen

THE AMMONITE VIOLIN (MURDER BALLAD NO. 4)

Sometimes we wear our inspirations on our sleeve, and they are not the least bit cryptic. That’s surely the case with this story, a retelling of a classic murder ballad, “The Twa Sisters,” the earliest known variant of which appears in 1656. My childhood in the foothills of the Appalachians was filled with murder ballads, what my mother called dead-baby songs. As an adult, they inform my fiction. Special thanks to Indrid Em (Robin Hazen), a luthier who gave me invaluable technical advice while I was writing “The Ammonite Violin.”

A Season of Broken Dolls

August 14, 2027

Sabit’s the one with a hard-on for stitchwork, not me. It is not exactly (or at all) my particular realm of expertise, not my cuppa, not my
scene
– as the beatniks used to say, back there in those happy Neolithic times. I mean the plethora of Lower Manhattan flesh-art dives like Guro/Guro or Twist or that pretentious little shitstain way down on Pearl –
Corpus Ex Machina
– the one that gets almost as much space in the police blotters as in the glossy snip-art rags. Me, I’m still laboring alone or nearly so in the Dark Ages, and she never lets me forget it. My unfashionable and unprofitable preoccupation with mere canvas and paint, steel and plaster, all that which has been deemed
démodé, passé,
Post-Relevant, all that which is fit only to fill up musty old museum vaults and public galleries, gathering more dust even than my career.
You still write on a goddamn keyboard, for chris’sakes,
she laughs.
You’re the only woman I ever fucked made being a living fossil a goddamn point of pride.
And then Sabit checks for my pulse – two fingers pressed gently to a wrist or the side of my throat – bcause, hey, maybe I’m not a living fossil at all. Maybe I’m that other kind, like Pollack and Mondrian, Henry Moore and poor old Man Ray.
No, no, no, the blood’s still flowing sluggishly along,
she smiles and lights a cigarette.
Too bad. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, my love.
Sabit likes to talk almost as much as she likes to watch. It’s not as though the bitch has a mark on her hide anywhere, not as though she’s anything but a tourist with a hard-on, a fetishist who cannot ever get enough of her kink. Prick her for a crimson bead and the results would come back same as mine, 98% the same as any chimpanzee. She knows how much contempt is reserved in those quarters for tourists and trippers, but I think that only makes her more zealous. She exhales, and smoke lingers like a unearned halo about her face. I should have dumped her months ago, but I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m just as addicted to sex as she is to nicotine and pills and vicarious stitchwork. She calls herself a poet, but she has never let me read a word she’s written, if she’s ever written a word. I found her a year ago, almost a year ago, found her in a run-down titty bar getting fucked up on vodka and laudanum and speed and the too-firm silicone breasts of women who might have been the real thing – even if their perfect boobs were not – or might only have been cheap japandroids. She followed me home, fifteen years my junior, and the more things change, the more things stay the way they were day before day before yesterday, day before I met Sabit and her slumberous Arabian eyes. My sloe-eyed stitch-fiend of a girlfriend, and I have her, and she has me, and we’re as happy as happy can be, and I pretend it means something more than orgasms and not being alone, something more than me annoying her and her taunting and insulting me. Now she’s telling me there’s a new line-up down @
Corpus Ex Machina
(hereafter known simply as
CeM
), and we have to be there tomorrow night.
We have to be there
, she says.
The Trenton Group is showing, and last time the Trenton Group showed, there was almost a riot, so we have to be there.
I have deadlines that have nothing whatsoever to do with that constantly revolving meat-market spectacle, and in a moment I’ll finish this entry & then I’ll tell her that, and she’ll tell me we have to be there, we have to be there, & there will be time to finish my articles later. There always is, & I’m never late. Never late enough to matter. I’ll go with her, bcause I do not trust her to go alone – not go alone
and
come back here again – she’ll tell me that, and she’ll be right as fucking rain. Her smug triumph, well that’s a given. Just as my obligatory refusal followed by inevitable, reluctant acquiescence is also a given. We play by the same rules every time. Now she’s on about some scandal @ Guro/Guro – chicanery and artifice, prosthetics, and she says,
They’re all a bunch of gidding poseurs, the shitheels run that sorry dump. Someone ought to burn it to the ground for this.
You know how to light a match, I reply, & she rolls her dark eyes @ me. No rain today. No rain since…June. The sky at noon is the color of rust, and I wish it were winter. Enough for now. Maybe she’ll shut up for 10 or 15 if I fuck her.

August 16, 2027

“You’re into that whole
scene,
right?” Which only shows to go once again that my editor still has her head rammed so far up her ass that her farts smell like toothpaste. But I said yeah, sure, bcause she wanted someone with cred on the Guro/Guro story, the stitch chicanery, allegations of fraud among the freaks, & what else was I supposed to say? I can’t remember the last time I had the nerve to turn down a paying assignment. Must have been years before I met Sabit, at least. So, yeah, I tagged along last night, just like she wanted – both of them wanted – she & she, but @ least I can say it’s work, and Berlin picked up the tab. Sabit’s out, so I don’t have her yammering in my goddamn ear, an hour to myself, perhaps, half an hour, however long it takes her to get back with dinner. I wanted to put something down, something that isn’t in the notes and photos I’ve already filed with the pre-edit gleets. Fuck. I’ve been popping caps from Sabit’s pharmacopoeia all goddamn day long, I don’t even know what, the baby-blue ones she gets $300/two dozen from Peru, the ones she says calm her down but they’re not calming me down. They haven’t even dulled the edge, so far as I can tell. But, anyway, there we were @
CeM
, in the crowded Pearl St. warehouse passing itself off as a
slaughter
house or a zoo or an exhibition or what the fuck ever, and there’s this bird from Tokyo, and I never got her name, but she had eyes all the colors of peacock feathers, iridescent eyes, and she recognized me. Some monied bird with pretty peacock eyes. She’d read the series I wrote in ‘21 when the city finally gave up and let the sea have the subway.
I read a lot,
she said.
I might have been a journalist myself,
she said. That sort of shit. Thought she was going to ask me to sign a goddamn cocktail napkin. And I’m smiling & nodding yes, bcause that’s agency policy, be nice to the readers, don’t feed the pigeons, whatever. But I can’t take my eyes off the walls. The walls are new. They were just walls last time Sabit dragged me down to one of her snip affairs. Now they’re alive, every square inch, mottled shades of pink and gray and whatever you call that shade between pink and gray. Touch them (Sabit must have touched them a hundred times) and they twitch or sprout goose bumps. They sweat, those walls. And the peacock girl was in one ear, and Sabit was in the other, the music so loud I was already getting a headache before my fourth drink, and I was trying to stop looking at those walls.
Pig,
Sabit told me later in the evening.
It’s all just pig,
and she sounded disappointed. Most of this is in the notes, though I didn’t say how unsettling I found those walls of skin. I save the revulsion for my own dime. Sabit says they’re working on adding functional genitalia and…fuck. I hear her at the door. Later, then. She has to shut up and go to sleep eventually.

August 16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)

Sabit came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these days food is only fucking food – curry or wasabi, but when I
asked
why she’d changed her mind, she just stared at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep, snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. & I’m losing the momentum I needed to say
anything
more about what happened @
CeM
on Sat. night. It’s all fading, like a dream. I’ve been reading one of Sabit’s books,
The Breathing Composition
(Welleran Smith, 2025), something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor & theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find – or what any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down? That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do
you
dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you
dream
in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to sleep? There was so goddamn much @
CeM
to turn my fucking stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and popping your blue Peruvian bon bons. Just this one thing. I’m not the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx, the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah?
Ad infinitum, ad nauseam,
hail Mary, full of beans. Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions. But now,
now
Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So, here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel. Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh, towers of iron – oh yeah, sure – fucking corpses heaped in dumpsters and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget the kid with the Cuisinart – sure, fine – but that one labeled #17, oh, now
that’s
another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’ Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the way it goes?

Are you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book, Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here, while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to say about #17:

And Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” & turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause she’d drugged her lover – she was a lesbian; of course, she had to be a lesbian – she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed,
after
performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ, Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m guessing –
hyperlucid
& worshipped by the snips – & maybe the woman she mutilated is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched her up (ha, ha fucking ha). Maybe even made her good as new again, but I doubt it. I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp, when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @ Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have screwed just to piss you off, Sabit. I should have brought her back here and fucked her in our bed, let her use your toothbrush, & maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking after.

August 18, 2027

I’m off the Guro/Guro story. Missed the
extended
DL tonight, no copy, never even made it down to the gallery. Just my notes and photos from
CeM
for someone else to pick up where I left off. Lucky the agency didn’t let me go. Lucky or unlucky. But they can’t can me, not for missing a deadline or two. I have rep, I have creds, I have awards & experience & loyal goddamn readers. Hell, I still get a byline on this thing; it’s in my contract. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

August 19, 2027

Welleran Smith’s “Jane Doe” died about six months ago, back in March. I asked some questions, said it was work for the magazine, tagged some people who know people who could get to the files. It was a suicide – oh, and never you mind that she’d been on suicide watch for years. This one was a certified trooper, a bona-fide martyr in the service of her own undoing. She chewed her tongue in half & choked herself on it. She had a name, too. Don’t know if Smith knew it & simply withheld it, or if he never looked that far. Maybe he only prigged the bits he needed to put the snips in orbit & disregarded the rest. “Jane Doe” was Judith Louise Darger, born 1992, Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale, specialized in urban neomythology, syncretism, etc. & did a book with HarperC back in ’21 –
Bloody Mary, La Llorona, and the Blue Lady: Feminine Icons in a Fabricated Child’s Apocalypse.
Sold for shit, out of print by 2023. But found a battered copy cheap uptown @ Paper Museum. Darger’s gf and victim, she’s dead, too. Another suicide, not long after they put Darger away. Turns out, she had a history of neurosis and
self
-mutilation going back to high school, & there was all sorts of shit there I’m not going to get into, but she told the courts that what Darger did to her, and to herself, they’d planned the whole thing for months. So, why the fuck did good old Welleran Smith leave
that
part out? It was in the goddamn press, no secret. I have a photograph of Judith Darger, right here on the dj of her book. She could not look less remarkable. Sabit says there’s another Trenton Group show this weekend & don’t I wanna to go? She’s hardly said three words to me the last couple of days, but she told me this. Get another look at #17, she said, & I almost fucking hit her. No more pills, Schuler. No more pills. You’re frying.