Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (42 page)

Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

All those people in the bar have begun applauding, and Eli takes a bow and sets his mike back into its stand.

“What you saw,” Joey sneers, “I got as much right to know as you. We were both slopping about in that stiff’s innards, and if something was wrong with him, I deserve to know. You got no place keepin’ it from me.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I tell him, wishing it were the truth. “Now, are you going to shoot me or put away the roscoe and make nice?”

“Making you nervous?” asks Joey.

“Not really, but the potential for injury is pissing me off righteously.”

I reach the top that’s not a top, and now I’m almost certain it’s actually some sort of return capsule from a space probe. One side is scorched black, so I suppose that must be the heat shield. I stand three or four feet back, and I never, in any version of the dream, have touched the thing. It’s maybe five feet in diameter, maybe a little less. I’m wondering how long its been out here, and where it might have traveled before hurtling back to earth, and, while I’m at it, why no retrieval team’s come along to fetch the thing. I wonder if it’s even a NASA probe, or maybe, instead, a chunk of foreign hardware that strayed from its target area. Either way, no one leaves shit like this lying around in the goddamn desert. I know
that
much.

“Yeah, you know it all,” Joey says and jabs me a little harder with the muzzle of his gun. “You must be the original Doctor Albert Eisenstein, and me, I’m just some schmuck can’t be trusted with the time of day.”

Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket…

And on the rooftop, Eli tells me, “The star at the centaur’s knee is Alpha Sagittarii, or Rukbat, which means ‘knee’ in Arabic. Rukbat is a blue class B star, one hundred and eighteen light years away. It’s twice as hot as the sun and forty times brighter.”

“You been holding out on me,
chica.
Here I thought you were nothing but good looks and grace, and then you get all Wikipedia on me.”

Eli laughs, and the crowded, noisy bar on Locust Street dissolves like fog, and the desert fades to half a memory. Joey the Kike and his pea-shooter, the dead scorpion and the bottle of Wild Turkey, every bit of it merely the echo of an echo now. I’m standing at the doorway of our bathroom, the tiny bathroom in mine and Eli’s place in Chinatown. Regardless which rendition of the dream we’re talking about, sooner or later they
all
end here. I’m standing in the open door of the bathroom, and Eli’s in the old claw-foot tub. The air is thick with steam and condensation drips in crystal beads from the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Even the floor, that mosaic of white hexagonal tiles, is slick. I’m barefoot, and the ceramic feels slick beneath my feet. I swear and ask Eli if he thinks he got the water hot enough, and he asks me about the briefcase I delivered to the Czech. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask how the hell he knows about the delivery.

“What about we don’t talk shop just this once,” I say, as though it’s something we make a habit of doing. “And how about we most especially don’t linger on the subject of the fucking Czech?”

“Hey,
you
brought it up, lover, not me,” Joey says, returning the soap to the scallop-shaped soap dish. His hand leaves behind a smear of silver on the sudsy lavender bar. I stare at it, trying hard to recall something important that’s teetering right there on the tip end of my tongue.

For love may come an’ tap you on the shoulder, some starless night…

“Make yourself useful and hand me a towel,” he says. “Long as you’re standing there, I mean.”

I reach into the linen closet for a bath towel, and when I turn back to pass it to Eli, he’s standing, the water lapping about his lower calves. Only it’s not water anymore. It’s something that looks like mercury, and it flows quickly up his legs, his hips, his ass, and drips like cum from the end of his dick. Eli either isn’t aware of what’s going on, or he doesn’t care. I hand him the towel as the silver reaches his smooth, hairless chest and begins to makes its way down both his arms.

“Anyway,” he says, “we can talk about it or we can not talk about it. Either way’s fine by me. So long as you don’t start fooling yourself into thinking your hands are clean. I don’t want to hear about how you were only following orders, you know?”

It’s easy to forget them without tryin’, with just a pocketful of starlight.

My ears haven’t popped, and there’s been no dizziness, but, all the same, the bathroom is redolent with those caustic triplets, ammonia and ozone, and, more subtly, sugar sizzling away to a carbon-black scum. The silver has reached Eli’s throat and rushes up over his chin, finding its way into his mouth and nostrils. A moment more, and he stands staring back at me with eyes like polished ball bearings.

“You and your gangster buddies, you get it in your heads you’re only blameless errand boys,” Eli says, and his voice has become smooth and shiny as what the silver has made of his flesh. “You think ignorance is some kind of virtue, and none of the evil shit you do for your taskmasters is ever coming back to haunt you.”

I don’t argue with him, no matter whether Eli (or the sterling apparition standing where Eli stood a few moments before) is right or wrong or someplace in between. I could disagree, sure, but I don’t. I’m reasonably fucking confident it no longer makes any difference. The towel falls to the floor, fluttering like a drogue parachute in a desert gale, and Eli steps out of the tub, spreading silver in his wake.

HYDRARGUROS

“Jason Statham stars in this near-future cybernoir thriller, soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, directed by…” Pretty much, yeah. And there’s quite likely a nod to Kathe Koja in here that I was entirely unaware of until years after I’d written the story. To me, those are the best sorts of nods.

Houndwife

1.

Memory fails, moments bleeding one against and into the next or the one before, merging and diverging and commingling again farther along. Rain streaking glass, muddy rivers flowing to the sea, or blood on a slaughterhouse floor, wending its way towards a drain. There was a time, I am still reasonably certain, when all this might have been set forth as a mere
tale,
starting at some more or less arbitrary, but seemingly consequential, moment: the day I first met Isobel Endecott, the evening I boarded a train from Savannah to Boston, or the turning of frail yellowed pages in a black magician’s grimoire and coming upon the graven image of a jade idol. But I am passed now so far out beyond the conveniences and conventions of chronology and narrative and gone down to some place so few (and so very many) women before me have ever gone. It cannot be a tale, any more than a crystal goblet dropped on a marble floor may ever again hold half an ounce of wine. I have been dropped, like that, from a great height, and I have shattered on a marble floor. I may not have been dropped. I may have only fallen, but that hardly seems to matter now. I may have been pushed, also. And, too, it might well be I was dropped, fell,
and
was pushed, none of these actions necessarily being mutually exclusive of the others. I am no different from the broken goblet, whose shards do not worry overly about how they came to be divided from some former whole.

Memory fails. I fall. Not one or the other, but both. I tumble through the vulgar, musty shadows of sepulchers. I lie in my own grave, dug by my own hands, and listen to hungry black beetles and maggots busy at my corporeal undoing. I am led to the altar on the dais in the sanctuary of the Church of Starry Wisdom, to be bedded and worshipped and bled dry. I look up from a hole in the earth and see the bloated moon. There is no ordering these events, no matter how I might try, if I even
cared
to try. They occurred, or I am yet rushing towards them. They are past and present and future, realized and unrealized and imagined and inconceivable; I would be a damned fool to worry over such trivialities. Better I be only damned.

“It was lost,” Isobel tells me. “For a very long time it was lost. There were rumors it had gone to Holland, early in the Fifteenth Century, that it was buried there with one who’d worn it in life. Other stories say it was stolen from the grave of that man sometime in the 1920’s and carried off to England.”

I sip coffee while she talks.

“It’s all bound up in irony and coincidence, and, really, I don’t give that sort of prattle much credence,” she continues. “The Dutchman who’s said to have been buried with the idol, some claim he was a grave robber, that he fancied himself a proper ghoul. Charming fellow, sure, and then, five hundred years later, along come these two British degenerates – from somewhere in Yorkshire, I think. Supposedly, they dug him up and stole the idol, which they found hung around his neck.”

“But before that…I mean, before the Dutchman, where might it have been?” I ask, and Isobel smiles. Her smile could melt ice, or freeze the blood, depending on one’s perspective and penchant for hyperbole and metaphor. She shrugs and sets her coffee cup down on the kitchen table. We’re sitting together in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. The building was constructed in the 1890’s, as cold storage for the wares of fur merchants. The walls are thick and solid and keep our secrets. She lights a cigarette and watches me a moment.

My train is pulling into South Station; I’ve never visited Boston before, and I shall never leave. It’s a rainy day, and I’ve been promised that Isobel will be waiting for me on the platform.

“Well, before Holland – assuming, of course, it was ever
in
Holland – I’ve spoken with a man who thinks it might have spent time in Greece, hidden at the Holy Trinity Monastry at Metéora, but the monastery wasn’t built until 1475, so this really doesn’t jibe with the story of the Dutch grave robber. Of course, the hound is mentioned in
Al Azif.
But you know that.” And then the conversation shifts from the jade idol to archaeology in Damascus, and then Yemen, and, finally, the ruins of Babylon. In particular, I listen to Isobel describe the blue-glazed tiles of the Ishtar Gate, with their golden bas-reliefs of lions and auroch bulls and the strange, dragon-like
sirrush.
She saw a reconstructed portion of the gate at the Pergamon Museum when she was in Berlin, many years ago.

“In Germany, I was still a young woman,” she says and glances at a window and the city lights, the Massachusetts night and the yellow-orange skyglow that’s there so no one ever has to look too closely at the stars.

This is the night of the new moon, and Isobel kneels before me and bathes my feet. I’m naked save the jade idol on its silver chain, hung about my neck. The temple of the Starry Wisdom smells of frankincense, galbanum, sage, clove, myrrh, and saffron smoldering in iron braziers suspended from the high ceiling beams. Her ash-blonde hair is pulled back from her face, pinned into a neat chignon. Her robes are the color of raw meat. I don’t want her to look me in the eyes, and yet I cannot imagine going up the granite stairs to the dais without first having done so, without that easy, familiar reassurance. Dark figures in robes of half a dozen other shades of red and black and grey press in close from all sides. The colors of their robes denote their rank. I close my eyes, though I have been forbidden to do so.

“This is our daughter,” barks the High Priestess, the old one crouched near the base of the altar. Her voice is phlegm and stripped gears, discord and tumult. “Of her own will does she come, and of her own will and the will of the Nameless Gods will she make the passage.”

And even in this instant – here at the end of my life
and
the beginning of my existence – I cannot help but smile at the High Priestess’ choice of words, at force of habit, her calling them
the Nameless Gods,
when we have given them so very many names over the millennia.

“She will see what we cannot,” the High Priestess barks. “She will walk unhindered where our feet will never tread. She will know their faces and their embrace. She will suffer fire and flood and the frozen wastes, and she will dine with the Mother and the Father. She will take a place at their table. She will know their blood, as they will know hers. She will fall and sleep, be raised and walk.”

I am pulling into South Station.

I am drinking coffee with Isobel.

I am nineteen years old, dreaming of a Dutch churchyard and violated graves. My dream is filled with the rustle of leathery wings and the mournful baying of some great, unseen beast. I smell freshly broken earth. The sky glares down at all the world with a single cratered eye which humanity, in its merciful ignorance, would mistake for a full autumnal moon. There are two men with shovels and pick axes. Fascinated, I watch their grim, determined work, an unspeakable thievery done sixty-three years before my own birth. I hear the shovel scrape stone and wood.

In the temple, Isobel rises and kisses me. It’s no more than the palest ghost of all the many kisses we’ve shared during our long nights of lovemaking, those afternoons and mornings spent exploring one another’s bodies and desires and most taboo fancies.

The Hermit passes a jade cup to the Hierophant, who in turn passes it to Isobel. Though, in this place and in this hour, Isobel is
not
Isobel Endecott. She is the Empress, as I am here named the Wheel of Fortune. I have never seen this cup until now, but I know well enough that it was carved untold thousands of years before this night and from the same vein of leek-green
piedra de ijada
as the pendant I wear about my throat. The mad Arabian author of the
Al Azif
believed the jade to have come from the Plateau of Y’Pawfrm e’din Leng, and it may be he was correct. The Empress places the rim of the cup to my lips, and I drink. The bitter ecru tincture burns going down, and it kindles a fire in my chest and belly. I know this is the fire that will make ashes of me, and from those ashes will I rise as surely as any phoenix.

“She stands at the threshold,” the High Priestess growls, “and soon will enter the Hall of the Mother and the Father.” The crowd murmurs blessings and blasphemies. Isobel’s delicate fingers caress my face, and I see the longing in her blue eyes, but the High Priestess may not kiss me again, not in this life.

“I will be waiting,” she whispers.

My train leaves Savannah.

“Do you miss Georgia?” Isobel asks me, a week after I arrive in Boston, and I tell her yes, sometimes I do miss Georgia. “But it always passes,” I say, and she smiles.

I am almost twenty years old, standing alone on a wide white beach where the tannin-stained Tybee River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, watching as a hurricane barrels towards shore. The outermost rain bands lash the sea, but haven’t yet reached the beach. The sand around me is littered with dead fish and sharks, crabs and squid. On February 5th, 1958, a B-47 collided in midair with an F-86 Sabre fighter 7,200 feet above this very spot, and the crew of the B-47 was forced to jettison the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb it was carrying; the “Tybee bomb” was never recovered and lies buried somewhere in silt and mud below the brackish waters of Wassaw Sound, six or seven miles southwest of where I’m standing. I draw a line in the sand, connecting one moment to another, and the hurricane wails.

I am sixteen, and a high-school English teacher is telling me that if a gun appears at the beginning of a story, it should be fired by the end. If it’s a bomb, the conscientious author should take care to be certain it explodes, so that the reader’s expectations are not neglected. It all sounds very silly, and I cite several examples to the contrary. The English teacher scowls and changes the subject.

In the temple of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I walk through the flames consuming my soul and take my place on the altar.

2.

It’s a sweltering day in late August 20__, and I walk from the green shade of Telfair Square, moving north along Barnard Street. I would try to describe here the violence of the alabaster sun on this afternoon, hanging so far above Savannah, but I know I’d never come close to capturing in words the sheer
spite
and
vehemence
of it. The sky is bleached as pallid as the cement sidewalk and the whitewashed bricks on either side of the street. I pass what was once a cotton and grain warehouse, when the New South was still the Old South, more than a century ago. The building has been “repurposed” for lofts and boutiques and a trendy soul-food restaurant. I walk, and the stillness of the summer afternoon makes my footsteps seem almost loud as thunderclaps. I can feel the dull beginnings of a headache and wish I had a Pepsi or an orange drink, something icy cold in a perspiring bottle. I glance through windows at the air-conditioned sanctuaries on the other side of the glass, but I don’t stop and go inside.

The night before this day there were dreams I will never tell anyone until I meet Isobel Endecott, two years farther along. I had dreams of a Dutch graveyard, and of a baying hound, and awoke to find an address on West Broughton scribbled on the cover of a paperback book I’d been reading when I fell asleep. The handwriting was indisputably mine, though I have no memory of having picked up the ballpoint pen on my nightstand and writing the address. I did not get back to sleep until sometime after sunrise, and then there were only more dreams of that cemetery and the spire of a cathedral and the two men, busy with their picks and shovels.

I glance directly at the sun, daring it to blind me.

“You knew where to go,” Isobel says, my first evening in Boston, my first evening with her, and already I felt as though I’d known her all my life. “The time was right, and you were chosen. I can’t even imagine such an honor.”

It is late August, and I sweat and walk north until I come to the intersection with West Broughton Street. I am clutching the paperback copy of
Absalom, Absalom!
in my left hand, and I pause to read the address again. Then I turn left, which also means I turn west.

“The stars were right,” she says and pours me another brandy. “Which is really only another way of saying these events cannot occur until it is
time
for them to occur. That there is a proper sequence. A protocol.”

I walk west down West Broughton until I come to the address that my sleeping self wrote on the Faulkner book. It’s a shop (calling itself an “emporium”) specializing in antique jewelry, porcelain figurines, and Oriental curios. Inside, after the scorching gaze of the sun, the dusty gloom seems almost frigid. I find what I did not even know I was looking for in a display case near the register. It is one of the most hideous things I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful, too. I guess the stone is jade, but it’s only a guess. I know next to nothing about gemstones and the lapidary arts. That day, I do not even know the word
lapidary.
I won’t learn it until later, when I begin asking questions about the pendant.

There’s a middle-aged man sitting on a stool behind the counter. He watches me through the lenses of his spectacles. He has about him a certain mincing fastidiousness. I notice the mole above his left eyebrow and that his clean nails are trimmed almost to the quick. I notice there’s a hair growing from the mole. My mother always said I had an eye for detail.

“Anything I can show you today?” he wants to know, and I only
almost
hesitate before nodding and pointing to the jade pendant.

“Now, that is a very peculiar piece,” he says, leaning forward and sliding the back of the case open. He reaches inside and lifts the pendant and its chain from a felt-lined tray. The felt is a faded shade of burgundy. He sits up again and passes the pendant across the counter to me. I’d not expected it to be so heavy or to feel so slick in my fingers, almost as though it were coated with oil or wax.

“Picked it up at an estate sale, a few years back,” says the fastidious seller of antiques. “Never liked the thing myself, but different strokes, as they say. If I only stocked what I liked, wouldn’t make much of a living, now would I?”