“Change comes with a price,” said a gentle voice.
He lowered his eyes from the crawling firmament to find her standing against a veiled background. Long lengths of gauze, backlit by some faint and indistinct illumination. Her vest glittered, hung with singing pieces of starlight. Instruments.
“Hope…”
She moved toward him, the tools chiming softly.
She took his hand, closed his eyes with a soft palm, and gently pressed her lips to his. The feel of it, and the smell of her hair, brought a flood of associations: The time he had first walked up to her and said hello; the way she had smiled at his distracted manner, completely unaware of Walter badgering him constantly with talk about this and she likes that; the clumsy way she had first grabbed him—suddenly and awkwardly turning his face to hers—the kiss landing to the left of his mouth as they sat on his mother’s couch watching an old rerun of 21 Jump Street.
Suni opened his eyes and looked to what lay beyond her. Earthen platforms apparently grown from the soil of the cave where they stood, spaced evenly about; rectangular slabs, each one with a thin veil drawn around it, concealing what lay there. Through the thin material Suni could see silhouettes, and they weren’t human. They weren’t even the shapes of any animals he recognized.
“I want to be with you,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be with you.” Her hand squeezed his. “And now I can.”
Suni looked at her, drank her in. “Yyy-you muh-mean that?”
She nodded, a gentle smile creeping at the corners of her mouth. “I mean that.”
“So…www-wuh-what are you doing with these?” He ran a finger over one of the instruments, something like a knitting needle. It sang louder.
“This is how you become what you’ve always wanted.”
His stomach sank and he stepped away. He couldn’t take much more of this. “No. Fuck that. Nuh-not again.” In the last two days he’d had everything he was pulled from his head and rammed back in. He wouldn’t withstand being reintroduced to himself all over again.
“You already agreed.”
“Nnn-no.”
“Three times you agreed.” She stepped closer, and something slid painlessly through his navel and out through his spine. Cold threads crept upward, enveloping his brain, and sensation ceased. The flesh of his face felt slack and weighty, hung on his skull like a heavy leather hood.
“No pain,” she said. There was a blade in her hand. “Nothing but what you’ve always wanted.”
She was having a little trouble thinking. She had that feeling, like when there’s something you’re supposed to remember. Only she knew there wasn’t anything she was supposed to remember at all, yet she still had that feeling, like she’d forgotten something…something.
“Let him go.”
She rummaged through the jumble of who she was. My name is Hope. My mother’s name is…Victoria. My father’s name is…was…David. I like Suni, and…circus music…and…and…something white. She shut her eyes, tried to see it rather than think it. It was there. It was right there. The memory of it…of him…of something solid, and true, and real. She could feel the memory of it, waiting to put her back together. Something familiar, something part of her, as old as the universe…something she had been too long separated from. The thing that kept her alive, and cohesive, throughout her entire life. Things flew apart, people crumbled, but always she remained.
But not anymore.
Music. There was music. Circus music.
She remembered now. It had been taken away. She looked down, despondent, frustrated. She looked at her shirt. GUNSMITH CATS. She shut her eyes. Something white. Something she liked. She had a tattoo. What was it of? Her mother’s name was…was…
Her father’s name was…was…
Henry.
“Hope, you’ve got to take that out of him.”
Her memories, her sense of identity, her knowledge, were a series of colored windows sliding and moving in front of one another. Occasionally, when there was a chance alignment of various disparate elements, she would regain a sense of who she was. But the windows would continue moving and sliding and orbiting, and the sense would pass, leaving her with nothing but the knowledge of something re-lost.
Something that prowled when the two right windows crossed. Something…
“Let him go.”
White.
“No. He said.”
“He’s useless to us. He doesn’t even know what’s happening. Let him go.”
“No!”
Henry’s dead hand touched her shoulder. An incoherent sound fired from her throat. She flicked and stumbled away, falling onto the dirt. He was standing over her, a black shape against the smoky luminescence filtering through the veils. Things slid from one part of her into another.
[Faces and memories melted together.]
She felt as if she existed in all times at once: past, present…She washed and melded with the little girl she had been, the woman she was becoming, her ideas of what she would be…she felt sick, confused, angry…
“What you’re feeling is a side effect of the operation.” [You were a mistake, Daddy had said.] “It can be fixed.” [You can be fixed, Daddy had said.]
Henry extended a hand.
[Daddy had backhanded her.]
She gritted her teeth.
[She had cried out.]
He said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
[He had said, “Look what you’re making me do.” She had said, “I’m sorry.”]
She said “Fuck you, Dad.”
[She had cried.]
She cried.
[The knife had been in her hand before she really knew it.]
She had something that felt like nothing and looked like silver. It cut as she swung out.
[She had cried.]
Henry looked at his hand, the split leather of the glove, the bloodless, parted flesh of his palm. So very little left that was human in the true sense of the word.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” he said, to no one in particular.
[Daddy had looked down at his bent-back sobbing daughter, at the woman she was becoming. “It’ll be good,” he had murmured.]
Hope shrieked.
[Hope had screamed.]
And stabbed Henry through the heart.
Some of her colored windows pass each other, and through them, fleetingly, Hope sees herself being led into the courthouse via a shielded rear entrance. She remembers being the center of a little flower of people, moving tightly from the rear of a van, into the laneway and then five or six steps to the door. There was a youth worker with her, and her solicitor, and a couple of cops, and a few people that she didn’t know. She remembers looking to her side, through the bundle of shoulders, and seeing a person standing at the end of the laneway, some guy eating an ice-cream cone, watching with blank interest. His red cap read 3DAY CLEARANCE and his T-shirt advised that if she wasn’t living on the edge she was taking up too much space.
In that moment her situation seemed lonelier than it ever had, and in that moment she remembers wishing that someone was holding her.
Someone she truly loved.
Hope swallowed and her bottom lip began to buckle. A tear splashed onto her mouth, and she kissed him. It tasted like gasoline.
“I love you,” Suni said. “Don’t do this.”
Her translocation from place to place was, to her, like remembering things. She would see it, be aware of it, but only at a distance. She would desire a place and there she would be.
Hope and Suni were back at the quarry, looking over the place that gave birth to who they had been. It was only appropriate that it should see what they had become.
She unhooked the sculpted syrette from her vest and silently told it what to do. It sang softly in response, aching with purpose.
What was left of Suni stood facing the city. She unclamped the cap from his skull, and slid the needle from his navel. She wanted him to feel this final becoming. He woul
d want to remember what it was like to change so completely from one thing to something else entirely.
She slid the syrette into his heart from behind and let it work. She had never done this before. She had done it since forever. She knew what she had to do because someone named Henry had dumped that information into her head. She knew what to do because this is what she was.
“Hey,” said a little voice. “Don’t do that to him. He can’t take that.”
Over her shoulder, Hope saw a little boy, standing. His name was on her lips for the second that two shifting, colored windows aligned. She had an impression of ice cream, and dogs. Of death, and love. And then it was gone.
The tools cried out, pulled at her vest. The boy raised a little hand, the instruments pulled harder.
For a moment she looked away from Suni, from the city lights brightening through what was left of his body.
“It was hard finding you,” the boy said. “You’re not as clear anymore.”
The little boy stepped toward her. He had such an earnest face. It reminded her of…photographs…Why didn’t he open his eyes?
She took a big gulp of air, blew her cheeks out, thought hard, exhaled. “I…” Her face contorted. “I…should get back to…”
The boy reached out and took her hand in his, turning his face up to her. “Hope,” he said. “Do you remember what happened to us? In the beginning?”
Her mind was beginning to cycle again, the windows were moving faster, slipping out of conjunction. She was forgetting what she knew, remembering things she had forgotten while trying simultaneously to hang on to what she’d always known…
The instruments sang. Each with its own voice.
There was something…something massive and low to the ground. Something she could glimpse through those windows in her head, when the right ones lined up…
Something was moving along the high wall of the quarry.
The boy reached up and touched the Anxietoscope. That song became a deafening shriek, like release, as the song of each one’s partner raised also, merged, combined, and became a single voice.
“Free us,” the little boy said, taking the Anxietoscope from her vest and slipping it over her finger. “Take this and know yourself.”
There was a glimpse of pelt the color of moonlight.
The boy turned at the sound, searching. A broad flank appeared, just for a moment between stone and scree, deep black and snow white…and then vanished once more. The smile slipped from his face. “Hope, that’s not who you think it is.” He snatched her hand, and they shifted.
She, Suni, the little boy…they were back in a familiar place. She had been born here, in this room with its shifting, scuttling ceiling, its cave floor, its myriad slabs and residents and the walls of gauze that separated them. The memory turned her eyes to Henry’s boot jutting from behind one of the closest slabs. Where she had left him with the simplest of tools resting in his heart.
A massive shape prowled lazily between the slabs, concealed and revealed by veils, scrims, and translucent drapery.
“I was looking for something,” she says.
Something white, says the cat.
Hope thinks. Looks at her shirt. That sounds right.
You’re in pieces, says the cat, and Hope knows it’s right. In pieces for the loss of me.
“Yes.”
Walter hissed, and became something else, something massive, something shaggy, with claws as long as her arm. Something that hunched forward with bared fangs, and roared loud enough to drown out everything including the ringing in her ears.
I’m nothing special as such, says the cat.
Her hand was a mirror. The boy had put that on her.
Just a manifestation of your own strength.
It was so hungry, her hand.
The blind monster took a few steps forward, swinging its snout around, taking a scent.
He took that out of you, and now you’re adrift, pushed and pulled by vagaries and contrivances.
The monster’s head stopped moving, and it strode forward.
Let me back in.
“Yes.”
Let me back in.
Her hand wanted to sink into her own head. To pull everything out, including the experience of the pulling out. To self-consume, over and over, until…
“Hope, hang on. I’ve almost got him.”
Let me back in before he hurts me.
Clarity. “Yes.”
Hope lifted her head to the wolf and said
“Go away.”
The monster stumbled as it moved, crashed to one knee. A broken-clawed hand slamming down on a slab for support, catching the scrim, tearing it down. Hope took a step back.
“Hope…,” it said. “That’s not Mike. Mike’s gone.”
I am right here.
“It’s name is Felix. It wants the…”
Hope’s head hurt. “Felix…the cat?”
He lies.
“What? No, it…”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Wait.”
“Go away.”
The wolf buckled, its head dropped, back heaving.
Yes. Say it again.
The monster looked back over its shoulder, blind as it was. Its lip trembled, not with rage but…
“Hope…no.”
Don’t let it hurt me.
“You wanted me to show you…how to make birds. Remember?”
A white dove held in small hands. Harder to make than paper…
You must protect me.
A dark bedroom. A questing tentacle, in through the back of her head, headed for the bed. Screams.
“G…”
“Hope. Stay with me.”
Now she knew that voice. Remembered that little boy’s face. A circus. Clowns. Safety. His name…his name was…
“I love you.”
Felix screamed like he was dying, high and terrible and bestial.
In her head the tentacle ripped, as she remembered it. Felix kept screaming. She clapped her hands to her ears and shouted
“Go away!”
Yes.
The monster looked away, raising its head to the ceiling. The smallest of howls trickled from its lips and—like a collapsing temple—toppled to the ground.
Veiled by the dust of its own passing.
The tiger stood before her, broad and warm and massive. Its breath rolled like thunder in a barrel.
The Anxietoscope no longer felt quite so hungry.
Thank you so very much, said the tiger. You are tired, no? Perhaps I might carry your load awhile?
The tiger looked at her and smiled.
“My tiger had blue eyes,” Hope said. “Yours are black.”
The tiger stopped purring. Hope did not like the way it looked.
Merde, said the tiger.
And Hope fled.
The body lay like some black, fallen thing on the cave floor, face to the shifting ceiling. A delicate piece of quietly thrumming silver lodged beneath his sternum.
In his failing moments Henry remembered coming across something similar to this, maybe 150 years ago, upon first meeting Felix.
But that had been a long, long time ago.
“It is quite interesting what she has chosen to do to this young man, no?”
Henry shifted himself as best he could, got himself sitting up, then leaning against a slab. He was surprised to find Wally there, only a few feet away and fading. The kid looked thin as hell, all twelve feet and doglike. The life was draining out of him, and Henry knew right there and then what had happened. His charge had dismissed him.
“She has chosen,” Felix was saying, his back to both of them, playing the critic to Suni’s becoming. “To reduce this boy to a single aspect, has she not?” He glanced over his shoulder, hand to chin, an academic seeking the opinion of a colleague. “Intriguing.”
Henry turned his head and spat, weakly. His lights were going out. Not long now.
“What did you do to her
,” Walter said to Henry, sidelong into the dust.
“What was your name way back then anyway,” Henry countered. “Back before the Angel tore you up?”
Walter reached out, pulled himself closer to Henry, but there was nothing threatening in it. They were both outbound. This exchange was a last cigarette. “What did you do? Tell me.”
“There was a blockage,” Henry murmured. “Never seen anything like that before.”
“You used the ’scope.”
“Had to. Worked out what she was receptive to. Quickest and best way to tell her what she needed to know.”
“That blockage you removed, looked like an albino kitten?”
Henry nodded and moved his hand to his wound. What little strength he had left was there, in the instrument. “What was it?”
“Something I gave her,” Walter said. “A large part of what was holding her together. A meeting point for her strength and will. A good memory.” Walter angled his head. “You destroyed the one thing you wanted her for.”
The house could not have been quieter. Hope stood for a long time inside the front door, the street lamp’s light filtering through the door glass, feeling cold, keeping her company.
She walked through the living room, past the static eye of the television, into a kitchen smelling of last night’s food. Through the window above the sink the backyard was a blue-black otherworld. It was a world from which much had been taken, leaving nothing but shapes where things should be. She walked up the stairs and into her mother’s room.
The air was alive with invisible dust, the carpet having never been vacuumed. At the head of the aging water bed hung a black-and-silver portrait, picked up from the supermarket years ago, of a leopard stalking out of darkness. Her mother lay asleep beneath it in a sweater and pants, cover pulled up to her chin, all slack face and downturned mouth, dreaming dreams flat as tap water.
In the days before Walter fell asleep this woman had been happy, if old photographs and rosy reminiscences were anything to go by. Then something very important had been taken away from her foundation, and she had fallen to ruin.
The Music of Razors Page 28
