The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “This is the problem with explanations,” she says. “You ask for one, and it triggers an infinite regression. There is never a final question. Unless inquiry is halted by an arbitrary act. And it’s true, many inquiries are, if only by necessity.”

  “If I knew what you are, why you are, how you are, if there is any connection between you and the death of those three people . . .” I trail off, knowing she’ll finish my thought.

  She says, “. . . you’d only have another question, and another after that. Ad infinitum.”

  “I think I want to go home,” I whisper.

  “Then you should go home, don’t you think?”

  “What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?”

  Now she is leaning over me, on the bed with me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. “Only a bad dream,” she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn’t smell even remotely of fire.

  “Before The Village, you were here,” I say. “You’ve almost always been here.” I say. It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t mistake it for one. She doesn’t say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.

  She wraps her arms and legs about me—and, as I guessed, they are delicate and nothing like the legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We fuck. No, she fucks me. She fucks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I’ll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clicks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?

  I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lay on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.

  So, I do not say aloud, the dream didn’t end with the tree. I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her fucking me.

  I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.

  It doesn’t matter anymore.

  By dawn, the rain has stopped.

  7.

  I have breakfast, pack, fill up the Nissan’s tank, and pay my motel bill.

  By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it’s almost nine o’clock.

  I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the interstate, rather than passing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I’ll even go so far as to never step foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn’t be so hard to do.

  I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.

  I will do my damnedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story—he took my call this morning and was only mildly annoyed I’d missed the deadline—that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven’t heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I’ll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we’ll all have a good laugh.

  I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.

  It doesn’t matter anymore.

  INTERSTATE LOVE SONG (MURDER BALLAD NO. 8)

  “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

  —Cormac McCarthy

  1.

  THE IMPALA’S WHEELS singing on the black hot asphalt sound like frying steaks, USDA choice-cut T-bones, sirloin sizzling against August blacktop in Nevada or Utah or Nebraska, Alabama or Georgia, or where the fuck ever this one day, this one hour, this one motherfucking minute is going down. Here at the end, the end of one of us, months are a crimson thumb smudge across the bathroom mirror in all the interchangeable motel bathrooms that have come and gone and come again. You’re smoking and looking for music in the shoebox filled with cassettes, and the clatter of protective plastic shells around spools of magnetically coated tape is like an insect chorus, a cicada symphony. You ask what I want to hear, and I tell you it doesn’t matter, please light one of those for me. But you insist, and you keep right on insisting, “What d’you wanna hear?” And I say, well not fucking Nirvana again, and no more Johnny Cash, please, and you toss something from the box out the open passenger window. In the side-view mirror, I see a tiny shrapnel explosion when the cassette hits the road. Cars will come behind us, cars and trucks, and roll over the shards and turn it all to dust. “No more Nirvana,” you say, and you laugh your boyish girl’s laugh, and Jesus and Joseph and Mother Mary, I’m not going to be able to live in a world without that laugh. Look at me, I say. Open your eyes, please open your eyes and look at me, please. You can’t fall asleep on me. Because it won’t be falling asleep, will it? It won’t be falling asleep at all. We are on beyond the kindness of euphemisms, and maybe we always were. So, don’t fall asleep. Don’t flutter the eyelashes you’ve always hated because they’re so long and pretty, don’t let them dance that Totentanz tarantella we’ve delighted at so many goddamn times, don’t let the sun go down on me. You shove a tape into the deck. You always do that with such force, as if there’s a vendetta grudge between you and that machine. You punch it in and twist the volume knob like you mean to yank it off and yeah, that’s good, I say. That’s golden, Henry Rollins snarling at the sun’s one great demon eye. You light a Camel for me and place it between my lips, and the steering wheel feels like a weapon in my hands, and the smoke feels like Heaven in my lungs. Wake up, though. Don’t shut your eyes. Remember the day that we, and remember the morning, and remember that time in—shit, was it El Paso? Or was it Port Arthur? It doesn’t matter, so long as you keep your eyes open and look at me. It’s hours until sunrise, and have you not always sworn a blue streak that you would not die in the darkness? That’s all we’ve got here. In for a penny, in for a pound, but blackness, wall to wall, sea to shining sea, that’s all we’ve got in this fluorescent hell, so don’t you please fall asleep on me. Hot wind roars in through the Impala’s windows, the stink of melting tar, roaring like an invisible mountain lion, and you point west and say take that next exit. We need beer, and we’re almost out of cigarettes, and I want a pack of Starburst Fruit Chews, the tropical flavors, so the assholes better have those out here in the world’s barren shit-kicker asshole. You’ll just like always save all the piña colada ones for me. Then there’s a thud from the trunk, and you laugh that laugh of yours all over again, only now with true passion. “And we need a bottle of water,” I say. “No good to us and a waste of time and energy, and just a waste all the way round, if she ups and dies of heat stroke back there,” and you shrug. Hey, keep your eyes open, love. Please, goddamn it. You can do that for me, I know you can. And I break open one of the ampules of ammonia and cruelly wave it beneath your nostrils so that both eyes pop open wide, opening up cornflower blue, and I think of startled birds bursting from their hiding places in tall grass. Tall grass, there’s so much of tall grass here at the end, isn’t there? I kiss your forehead, and I can’t help thinking I could fry an egg on your skin, fry an egg on blacktop, fry an egg on the hood of the Impala parked in the dog-day sun outside a convenience store. You ask me to light a candle, your voice gone all jagged and broken apart like a cassette tape dropped on I-10 at 75 mph. I press my fingers and palm to the sloppy red mess of your belly, and I do not dare ta
ke my hand away long enough to light a candle, and I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I cannot even do that much for you. Just please don’t close your eyes. Please don’t you fall asleep on me.

  2.

  All these things you said to me, if not on this day, then surely on some other, and if not during this long Delta night, than surely on another. The blonde with one brown eye and one hazel-green eye, she wasn’t the first, but you said to me she’ll be the most memorable yet. She’ll be one we talk about in years to come when all the rest have faded into a blur of delight and casual slaughter. We found her at a truck stop near Shreveport, and she’d been hitching down I-49 towards Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Sister, where you bound on such a hot, hot, sweltersome night? you asked. And because she was dressed in red, a Crimson Tide T-shirt and a red Budweiser baseball cap, you said, “Whither so early, Little Red Cap?” And she laughed, and you two shared a joint while I ate a skimpy dinner of Slim Jims, corn chips, and Mountain Dew. Eighteen-wheeled dinosaurs growled in and growled out and purred at the pumps. We laughed over a machine that sold multi-colored prophylactics and another that sold tampons. And would she like a ride? Would she? ’Cause we’re a sight lot better than you’re likely gonna find elsewhere, if you’re looking for decent company and conversation, that is, and the weed, there’s more where that came from. How old? Eighteen, she said, and you and I both knew she was adding years, but all the better. She tossed her knapsack in the backseat, and the extra pair of shoes she wore around her neck, laces laced together. She smelled of the road, of many summer days without a bath, and the world smelled of dinosaur trucks and diesel and dust and Spanish moss; and I love you so much, you whispered as I climbed behind the wheel. I love you so much I do not have words to say how much I love you. We set sail southwards, washed in the alien chartreuse glow of the Impala’s dash, and she and thee talked while I drove, listening. That was enough for me, listening in, eavesdropping while my head filled up with a wakeful, stinging swarm of bees, with wasps and yellow jackets, courtesy those handy shrink-wrapped packets of dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, Black Beauties, and in the glove compartment there’s Biphetamine-T and 40mg capsules of methaqualone, because when we drove all damn day and all damned night, we came prepared, didn’t we, love? She’s traveled all the way from Chicago, the red-capped backseat girl, and you and I have never been to Chicago and have no desire to go. She talks about the road as it unrolls beneath us, before me, hauling us towards dawn’s early light. She tells you about some old pervert who picked her up outside Texarkana. She fucked him for twenty bucks and the lift to Shreveport. “Could’a done worse,” you tell her, and she doesn’t disagree. I watch you both in the rearview mirror. I watch you both, in anticipation, and the uppers and the prospect of what will come, the mischief we will do her in the wood, has me more awake than awake, has me ready to cum then and there. “You’re twins,” she said. It wasn’t a question, only a statement of the obvious, as they say. “We’re twins,” you reply. “But she’s my big sister. Born three minutes apart on the anniversary of the murder of Elizabeth Short,” and she has no goddamn idea what you’re talking about, but, not wanting to appear ignorant, she doesn’t let on. When she asks where we’re from, “Los Angeles,” you lie. You have a generous pocketful of answers at the ready for that oft-asked question. “South Norton Avenue, midway between Coliseum Street and West 39th,” you say, which has as little meaning to the heterochromatic blonde as does Glasgow smile and Leimert Park. I drive, and you spin our revolving personal mythology. She will be one for the books, you whispered back at the truck stop. Can’t you smell it on her? Can’t I smell what on her? Can’t you smell happenstance and inevitability and fate? Can’t you smell victim? You say those things, and always I nod, because, like backseat girl, I don’t want to appear ignorant in your view. This one I love, this one I love, eating cartilage, shark-eyes, shark-heart, and black mulberry trees means I will not survive you, when the truth is I won’t survive without you. Backseat girl, she talks about how she’s gonna find work in New Orleans as a waitress, when you and I know she’s cut out for nothing much but stripping and whoring the Quarter, and if this were a hundred years ago she’d be headed for fabled, vanished Storyville. “I had a boyfriend,” she says. “I had a boyfriend, but he was in a band, and they all moved off to Seattle, but, dude, I didn’t want to fucking go to fucking Seattle, you know?” And you say to her how it’s like the California Gold Rush or something, all these musician sheep lemming assholes and would-be wannabe musician posers traipsing their way to the fabled Northwest in hopes of riding a wave that’s already broken apart and isn’t even sea foam anymore. That ship has sailed , you say. It’s sailed and sunk somewhere in the deep blue Pacific. But that’s not gonna stop anyone with stars in their eyes, because the lure of El Dorado is always a bitch, whichever El Dorado is at hand. “Do you miss him?” I ask, and that’s the first thing I’ve said in over half an hour, more than happy just to listen in and count off the reflective mile markers with the help of anger and discord jangling from the tape deck. “Don’t know,” she says. And she says, “Maybe sometimes. Maybe.” The road’s a lonely place, you tell her, sounding sympathetic when I know so much better. I know your mind is full to the brim with red, red thoughts, the itch of your straight-razor lusts, the prospect of the coming butchery. Night cruising at 80 mph, we rush past the turnoff for Natchitoches, and there’s a sign that says “Lost Bayou,” and our passenger asks have we ever been to New Orleans. Sure, you lie. Sure. We’ll show you round. We have friends who live in an old house on Burgundy, and they say the house is haunted by a Civil War ghost, and they’ll probably let you crash there until you’re on your feet. Sister, you make us sound like goddamn guardian angels, the best break she’s ever had. I drive on, and the car reeks of pot and sweat, cigarette smoke and the old beer cans heaped on the back floorboard. “I’ve always wished I had a twin,” she says. “I used to make up stories that I was adopted, and somewhere out there I had a twin brother. One day, I’d pretend, we’d find one another. Be reunited, you know.” It’s a pretty dream from the head of such a pretty, pretty red-capped girl in the backseat, ferried by you and I in our human masks to hide hungry wolfish faces. I could turn you inside out, I think at the girl. And we will. It’s been a week since an indulgence, a week of aimless July motoring, letting peckish swell to starvation, taking no other pleasures but junk food and blue-plate specials, you and I fucking and sleeping in one another’s arms while the merciless Dixie sun burned 101˚F at motel-room rooftops, kerosene air gathered in rooms darkened and barely cooled by drawn curtains and wheezing AC. Strike a match, and the whole place woulda gone up. Cartoons on television, and watching MTV, and old movies in shades of black and white and grey. Burgers wrapped in meat-stained paper and devoured with salty fries. Patience, love, patience, you whispered in those shadows, and so we thrummed along back roads and highways waiting for just the right confection. And. My. Momma. Said. Pick the Very. Best One. And You. Are. It.

  3.

  Between the tall rustling corn-silk rows, ripening husks, bluebottles drone as the sun slides down from the greasy blue sky to set the horizon all ablaze, and you straddle Thin Man and hold his cheekbones so that he has no choice but to gaze into your face. He can’t close his eyes, as he no longer has eyelids, and he screams every time I shake another handful of Red Devil lye across his bare thighs and genitals. Soft flesh is melting like hot wax, here beneath the fading Iowa day. I draw a deep breath, smelling chemical burns, tilled red-brown Bible Belt soil, and corn, and above all else, corn. The corn smells alive in ways I cannot imagine being alive, and when we are done with Thin Man, I think I would like to lie down here, right here, in the dirt between the tall rows, and gaze up at the June night, at the wheeling twin dippers and bear twins and the solitary scorpion and Cassiopeia, what I know of summer stars. “You don’t have to do this,” the man blubbers, and you tell him no, we don’t, but yes, we do. We very much actually do. And he screams, and his scre
am is the lonesome cry of a small animal dying alone so near to twilight. He could be a rabbit in a fox’s jaws, just as easily as a thin man in our company. We found him standing alongside a pickup broken down miles and miles north of Ottumwa, and maybe we ought to have driven him farther than we did, but impatience wins sometimes, and so you made up that story about our Uncle Joe who has a garage just a little ways farther up the road. What did he have to fear from two pale girls in a rust-bucket Impala, and so I drove, and Thin Man—whose name I still unto this hour do not know—talked about how liberals and niggers and bleeding hearts and the EPA are ruining the country. Might he have become suspicious of our lies if you’d not switched out the plates at the state line? Might he have paused in his unelicited screed long enough to think twice and think better? You scoop up fertile soil and dribble it into his open mouth, and he gags and sputters and chokes and wheezes, and still he manages to beg throughout. He’s pissed himself and shat himself, so there are also those odors. Not too far away are train tracks, and not too far away there is a once-red barn, listing like a drunkard, and silver grain silos, and a whistle blows, and it blows, calling the swallows home. You sing to Thin Man, Heed the curves, and watch the tunnels. Never falter, never fail. Remember that? Don’t close your eyes, and do not dare sleep, for this is not that warm night we lay together near Thin Man’s shucked corpse and screwed in the eyes of approving Maggot Corn King deities thankful for our oblation. Your lips on my breasts, suckling, your fingers deep inside me, plowing, sewing, and by tomorrow we’ll be far away, and this will be a pleasant dream for the scrapbooks of our tattered souls. More lye across Thin Man’s crotch, and he bucks beneath you like an unbroken horse or a lover or an epileptic or a man being taken apart, piece by piece, in a cornfield north of Ottumwa. When we were children, we sat in the kudzu and live-oak shade near the tracks, waiting, waiting, placing pennies and nickels on the iron rails. You, spitting on the rails to cool them enough you would not blister your ear when you pressed it to the metal. I hear the train, you announced and smiled. Not much farther now, I hear it coming, and soon the slag ballast will dance and the crossties buck like a man dying in a cornfield. Soon now, the parade of clattering doomsday boxcars, the steel wheels that can sever limbs and flatten coins. Boxcars the color of rust—Southern Serves the South and CSX and a stray Wisconsin Central as good as a bird blown a thousand miles off course by hurricane winds. Black cylindrical tankers filled with corn syrup and crude oil, phenol, chlorine gas, acetone, vinyl chloride, and we spun tales of poisonous, flaming, steaming derailments. Those rattling, one-cent copper-smearing trains, we dreamed they might carry us off in the merciful arms of hobo sojourns to anywhere far, far away from home. Keep your hand upon the throttle, and your eye upon the rail. And Thin Man screams, dragging me back to the now of then. You’ve put dirt in his eyes, and you’d imagine he’d be thankful for that, wouldn’t you? Or maybe he was gazing past you towards imaginary pearly gates where delivering angels with flaming swords might sweep down to lay low his tormentors and cast us forever and anon into the lake of fire. More Red Devil and another scream. He’s beginning to bore me, you say, but I’m so busy admiring my handiwork I hardly hear you, and I’m also remembering the drive to the cornfield. I’m remembering what Thin Man was saying about fairy child-molesting atheist sodomites in all branches of the federal government and armed forces, and an international ZOG conspiracy of Jews running the USA into the ground, and who the fuck starts in about shit like that with total, helpful strangers? Still, you were more than willing to play along and so told him yes, yes, yes, how we were faithful, God-fearing Southern Baptists, and how our daddy was a deacon and our momma a Sunday school teacher. That should’a been laying it on too thick, anyone would’ve thought, but Thin Man grinned bad teeth and nodded and blew great clouds of menthol smoke out the window like a locomotive chimney. Open your eyes. I’m not gonna tell you again. Here’s another rain of lye across tender meat, and here’s the corpse we left to rot in a cornfield, and I won’t be left alone, do you hear me? Here are cordials to keep you nailed into your skin and to this festering, unsuspecting world. What am I, what am I, what am I? he wails, delirious, as long cornstalk shadows crosshatch the field, and in reply do you say, A sinner in the hands of angry gods, and we’d laugh about that one for days. But maybe he did believe you, sister, for he fell to praying, and I half believe he was praying not to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but to you and me. You tell him, By your own words, mister, we see thou art an evil man, and we, too, are surely out and about and up to no good, as you’ll have guessed, and we are no better than thee, and so there is balance. I don’t know why, but you tack on something about the horned, moon-crowned Popess squatting between Boaz and Jachin on the porch of Solomon. They are pretty words, whether I follow their logic or not. Near, nearer, the train whistle blows again, and in that moment you plunge your knife so deeply into Thin Man’s neck that it goes straight through his trachea and spine and out the other side. The cherry fountain splashes you. You give the Bowie a little twist to the left, just for shits and giggles. Appropriately, he lies now still as death. You pull out the knife and kiss the jetting hole you’ve made, painting sticky your lips and chin. Your throat. You’re laughing, and the train shrieks, and now I want to cover my ears, because just every once in a while I do lose my footing on the winding serpent highway, and when I do the fear wraps wet-sheet cold about me. This, here, now, is one of those infrequent, unfortunate episodes. I toss the plastic bottle of lye aside and drag you off Thin Man’s still, still corpse. Don’t, I say. Don’t you dare laugh no more, I don’t think it’s all that funny, and also don’t you dare shut your eyes, and don’t you dare go to sleep on me. Till we reach that blissful shore