Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (15 page)

A SEASON OF BROKEN DOLLS

During the winter of 2007, I was plagued by a terrible recurring dream. It came almost every night, and I’d spend the days in between the dream’s recurrence in a foggy state I have called
dreamsickness.
The dream, recorded in my LiveJournal (December 18, 2006 – March 11, 2007) and in the chapbook
B is for Beginnings
(Subterranean Press, 2009), left me with two short stories. I needed the dream visitation of what felt like a thoroughly authentic parallel life to end, and I meant to kill it with a short story. Two were required. “A Season of Broken Dolls” is the first, and is far less literal than the second, “In View of Nothing.” At the time I chided myself for abstracting the dream so entirely in “A Season of Broken Dolls,” but now I consider it one of my best pieces of science fiction.

In View of Nothing

02. The Bed

My breasts ache.

I have enough trouble just remembering the name of this city, and I have yet to be convinced that the name remains the same from one day to the next, one night to the next night. Or even that the city itself remains the same. These are the very sorts of details that will be my undoing someday, someday quite soon, if I am anything less than mindful. Today, I believe that I have awakened in Sakyo-ku, in the Kyoto Prefecture, but lying here staring up at the bright banks of fluorescent lights on the ceiling, I might be anywhere. I might well be in Boston or Johannesburg or Sydney, and maybe I’ve never even been to Japan. Maybe I have lived my entire life without setting foot in Kyoto.

From where I lie, almost everything seems merely various shades of unwelcome conjecture. Almost everything. I think about getting up and going to the window, because from there I might confirm or deny my Kyoto hypothesis. I might spy the Kamo River, flowing down from its source on Mount Sajikigatake, or the withered cherry trees that did not blossom last year and perhaps will not blossom this spring, either. I might see the silver-grey ribbon of the Kamo, running between the neon-scarlet flicker of torii gates at the Kamigamo and Shimogamo shrines. Maybe that window looks eastward, towards the not-so-distant ocean, and I would see Mount Daimonji. Or I might see only the steel and glass wall of a neighboring skyscraper.

I lie where I am and do not go to the window, and I stare up at the low plaster ceiling, the ugly water stains spread out there like bruises or melanoma or concentric geographical features on an ice moon of Saturn or Jupiter or Neptune. This whole goddamn building is rotten; I recall that much clearly enough. The ceiling of my room – if it
is
my room – has more leaks than I can count, and I think it’s not even on the top floor. The rain is loud against the window, but the dripping ceiling seems to my ears much louder, as each drop grows finally too heavy and falls to the ceramic tiles. I hear a distinct
plink
for each and every drop that drips down from the motel ceiling, and that
plink
does not quite seem to match what I recall about the sound of water dripping against tile.

The paler-than-oyster sheets are damp, too. As are the mattress and box springs underneath. Why there are not mushrooms, I can’t say. There is mold, mold or mildew if there’s some difference between the two, because I can smell it, and I can see it. I can taste it.

I lie here on my back and stare up at the leaky ceiling, listening to the rain, letting these vague thoughts ricochet through my incontinent skull. My mind leaks, too, I suspect, and in much the same way that this ceiling leaks. My thoughts and memories have stained the moldering sheets, discrete units of me drifting away in a slow flood of cerebrospinal fluid, my ears for sluice gates – or my eyes –
Liquor cerebrospinalis
draining out a few precious milliliters per day or hour, leaving only vast echoes in emptied subarachnoid cavities.

She looks at me over her left shoulder, her skin as white as snow that never falls, her hair whiter still, her eyes like broken sapphire shards, and she frowns, knitting her white eyebrows. She is talking into the antique black rotary telephone, but looking at me, disapproving of these meandering, senseless thoughts when I have yet to answer her questions to anyone’s satisfaction. I turn away – the exact wrong thing to do, and yet I do it, anyway. I wish she would put some clothes on. Her robe is hanging on a hook not far away. I would get it for her, if she would only ask. She lights a cigarette, and that’s good, because now the air wrapped all about the bed smells less like the mold and poisonous rainwater.

“We do the best we can,” she tells the telephone, whoever’s listening on the other end of the line, “given what we have to work with.”

Having turned away, I lie on my left side, my face pressed into those damp sheets, shivering and wondering how long now since I have been genuinely warm. Wondering, too, if this season is spring or winter or autumn. I am fairly certain it is not summer. She laughs, but I don’t shut my eyes. I imagine that the folds and creases of the sheets are ridges and valleys, and I am the slain giant of some creation myth. My cerebrospinal fluid will form lakes and rivers and seas, and trees will sprout, and grass and ferns and lichen, and all that vegetation shall be imbued with my lost, or merely forfeited, memories. The birds will rise up from fancies that have bled from me.

My breasts ache.

Maybe that has some role to play in this cosmogony, the aching, swollen breasts of the fallen giantess whose mind became the wide white-grey world.

“I need more time, that’s all,” the naked snow-coloured woman tells the black Bakelite handset. “There were so many more layers than we’d anticipated.”

With an index finger I trace the course of one of the V-shaped sheet valleys. It gradually widens towards the foot of the bed, towards my
own
feet, and I decide that I shall arbitrarily call that direction
south,
as I arbitrarily think this motel might exist somewhere in Kyoto. Where it ends, there is a broad alluvial fan, this silk-cotton blend splaying out into flat deltas where an unseen river at last deposits its burden of mnemonic silt and clay and sand – only the finest particles make it all the way over the far away edge of the bed to the white-tile sea spread out below. Never meaning to, I have made a
flat
white-grey world. Beyond the delta are low hills, smooth ridges in the shadow of my knees. Call it an eclipse, that gloom;
any
shadow in this stark room is Divine.

These thoughts are leading me nowhere, and I think now that they must exist only to erect a defence, this complete absence of direction. She has pried and stabbed and pricked that fragile innermost stratum of the meningeal envelope, the precious pia matter, and so triggered inside me these meandering responses. She thought to find only pliable grey matter waiting underneath, and maybe the answers to her questions – tap in, cross ref, download – but, no, here’s this damned firewall, instead. But I did not put it there. I am holding nothing back by choice. I know she won’t believe that, though it is the truth.

“Maybe another twelve hours,” she tells the handset.

I must be a barren, pitiless goddess, to have placed all those fluorescent tubes for a sun and nothing else. They shed no warmth from out that otherwise starless ivory firmament. Heaven drips to make a filthy sea, and she rings off and places the handset back into its Bakelite cradle. It is all a cradle, I think, this room in this motel in this city I cannot name with any certainty. Perhaps I never even left Manhattan or Atlanta or San Francisco.

“I’m losing patience,” she says and sighs impatiently. “More importantly, they’re losing patience with me.”

And I apologise again, though I am not actually certain this statement warrants an apology. I turn my head and watch as she leans back against her pillow, lifting the stumps of her legs onto the bed. She once told me how she lost them, and it was not so very long ago when she told me, but I can no longer remember that, either.

She smokes her cigarette, and her blue eyes seem fixed on something beyond the walls of the motel room.

“Maybe I should look at the book again,” I suggest.

“Maybe,” she agrees. “Or maybe I should put a bullet in your skull and say it was an accident.”

“Or that I was trying to escape.”

She nods and takes another drag off her cigarette. “If you are a goddess,” she asks, “what the fuck does that make me?”

But I have no response for that. No response whatsoever. The smoke from her lips and nostrils hangs above our damp bed like the first clouds spreading out above my flat creation of sheets and fallen giants. Her skin is milk, and my breasts ache.

I close my eyes, and possibly I smell cherry blossoms behind her smoke and the stink of mildew, and I try hard to recollect when I first walked the avenues of Kyoto’s Good Luck Meadow – Yoshiwara – the green houses and courtesans, boy whores and tea-shop girls, kabuki and paper dragons.

“You have never left this room,” she tells me, and I have no compelling reason either to believe her or to suspect that she’s lying.

“We could shut off the lights,” I say. “It could be dark for at least a little while.”

“There isn’t time now,” she replies and stubs out her cigarette on the wall beside the bed, then drops the butt to the floor, and I think I hear a very faint hiss when it hits the damp tiles. She’s left an ashen smudge on the wall near the plastic headboard, and that, I think, must be how evil enters the world.

04. The Book (1)

This is the very first time that she will show me the scrapbook. I
call
it a scrapbook, because I don’t know what else to call it. Her robotic knees whir and click softly as she leans forward and snaps open the leather attaché case. She takes the scrapbook out and sets it on the counter beside the rust-streaked sink. This is an hour or so after the first time we made love, and I’m still in bed, watching her and thinking how much more beautiful she is without the ungainly chromium-plated prosthetics. The skin around the external fix posts and neural ports is pink and inflamed, and I wonder if she even bothers to keep them clean. I wonder how much it must hurt, being hauled about by those contraptions. She closes the lid of the briefcase, her every move deliberate, somehow calculated without seeming stiff, and the ankle joints purr like a tick-tock cat as she turns towards me. She is still naked, and I marvel again at the pallid thatch of her pubic hair. She retrieves the scrapbook from the sink.

“You look at the photographs,” she says, “and tell me what you see there. This is what matters now, your impressions. We know the rest already.”

“I need a hot shower,” I tell her, but she shakes her head, and the robotic legs whir and move her towards the bed on broad tridactyl feet.

“Later,” she says. “Later, you can have a hot shower, after we’re done here.”

And so I take the scrapbook from her when she offers it to me – a thick sheaf of yellowed pages held between two sturdy brown pieces of cardstock, the whole thing bound together with a length of brown string. The string has been laced through perforations in the pages and through small silver grommets set into the cardstock covers, and each end of the string is finished with black aiglets to keep it from fraying. The string has been tied into a sloppy sort of reef knot. There is nothing printed or written on the cover.

“Open it,” she says, and her prosthetics whine and hiss pneumatic laments as she sits down on the bed near me. The box springs creak.

“What am I supposed to see?” I ask her.

“You are not
supposed
to see anything.”

I open the scrapbook, and inside each page displays four black-and-white photographs, held in place by black metal photo corners. And at once I see, as it is plainly obvious, that all the photographs in the book are of the same man. Page after page after page, the same man, though not always the same photograph. They look like mug shots. The man is Caucasian, maybe forty-five years old, maybe fifty. His eyes are dark, and always he is staring directly into the camera lens. There are deep creases in his forehead, and his skin is mottled, large pored, acne scarred, pockmarked. His lips are very thin, and his nose large and hooked. There are bags beneath his eyes.

“Who is he?” I ask.

“That’s not your problem,” she replies. “Just look at the pictures and tell me what you see.”

I turn another page, and another, and another after that, and on every one that haggard face glares back at up me. “They’re all the same.”

“They are not,” she says.

“I mean, they’re all of the same man. Who is he?”

“I said that’s not your problem. And surely you must know I haven’t brought you here to tell me what I can see for myself.”

So, I want to ask why she has brought me here, only I cannot recall being brought here. I am not certain I can recall anything before this white dripping room. It seems in this moment to be all I have ever known. I turn more pages, some so brittle they flake at my touch. But there is nothing to see here but the man with the shaved head and the hooked nose.

“Take your time,” she says and lights another cigarette. “Just don’t take too much of it.”

“If this is about the syringes – ”

“This isn’t about the syringes. But we’ll come to that later, trust me. And that Taiwanese chap, too, the lieutenant. What’s his name?”

“The war isn’t going well, is it?” I ask her, and now I look up from the scrapbook lying open in my lap and watch the darkness filling the doorway to our room. Our room or her room or my room, I cannot say which. That darkness seems as sticky and solid as hot asphalt.

“That depends whose side you’re on,” she says and smiles and flicks ash onto the floor.

It occurs to me for the first time that someone might be watching from that darkness, getting everything on tape, making notes, waiting and biding their time. I think I might well go mad if I stare too long into that impenetrable black. I look back down at the book, trying to see whatever it is she wants me to see on those pages, whatever it is she needs to know.

03. The Dream

The night after I lost the girl who lost the syringe – if any of that did in fact occur – I awoke in the white room on the not-quite-oyster sheets, gasping and squinting at those bare fluorescent tubes. My mouth so dry, my chest hurting, and the dream already beginning to fade. There was a pencil and a legal pad on the table beside the bed, and I wrote this much down:

This must have been near the end of it all, just before I finally woke. Being on the street of an Asian city, maybe Tokyo, I don’t know. Possibly an analym of every Asian city I have ever visited. Night. Flickering neon and cosplay girls and noodle shops. The commingled smells of car exhaust and cooking and garbage. And I’m late for an appointment in a building I can see, an immaculate tower of shimmering steel. I can’t read any of the street signs, because they’re all Japanese or Mandarin or whatever. I’m lost. Men mutter as they pass me. The cosplay girls laugh and point. There’s an immense animatronic Ganesh-like thing directing traffic (and I suppose this is foreshadowing). I finally find someone who doesn’t speak English, but she speaks German, and she shows me where to cross the street to reach the steel tower.