He alone didn’t laugh at me, just shrugged and asked me if I were new in Hell, and I said I was, and I said that he could just serve me anything that he had, and he served me the same old thing with a little look of resignation in his eyes. I said I was a traveling gemstone dealer and that I was looking for Mr. Relver, who had in his possession a jewel that I would like to examine and perhaps acquire.
“The Emerald Gemstone of Thoth?” the bartender asked.
This surprised me, and I didn’t reply.
The bartender shook his head sadly.
“Now why would you want that gemstone?” he said. “Because you’re up to no good, that’s why.”
He’d figured something out, which I suppose made him awfully clever, but I saw no triumph in his eyes. His face betrayed naught but betrayal, the undying sadness of a man who had once had to flee his Jarleau brothers, whom he had loved and trusted. A once-proud valieu now suffering for all eternity as a disgraced and murdered valieu-no-more.
“Don’t you know,” he asked me now, “that you’ve come to Albanadíqué to die?”
I had not known it for certain, although I’d suspected it, but instead I said that I was in Hell already and wondered how he expected me to die, and he said he figured that I would find out soon enough.
“Look,” he whispered. “I’ll keep your secret. I just don’t want to get caught in the cross-fire.”
I professed that I did not understand why it should be scandalous to ask to buy a gem from a gem merchant, but I told him I would do my best to keep him out of the crossfire, should any crossfire come to pass. I took leave of the bartender and returned to the crowd, where the sparkling repartee continued, and I found myself back under high society’s microscope, and I still liked it.
I expended another hour and a half on more tall tales of the cock-and-bull variety, and then a little man walked idly into the room, a blatherskite with one of those terrible bald heads — lumpy with divots, randomly reddish-orange and veiny — a little pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a dusty topcoat. I am not sure how I knew that this was Mr. Relver, but I knew that this was Mr. Relver.
I looked over at the bar, which my defrocked valieu had abandoned. I took Althea and Master Yu to one side, made a whispered plan to meet again at the English Tearoom should we become separated for any length of time, and I then introduced myself to Mr. Relver, and we talked a little bit about the caviar, and I was almost-drunk — as spooney as it was possible to become down here in 枉死城[] from this frothy mix of the carbonated pig-piss and acclaim — and it occurred to me that this man, Mr. Relver, probably harbored an irresistible attraction to web-footed women (it was not as unusual in the 19th century as it is to-day). Just something in his little eyes with his narrow pupils, just something in the glow that wafted up from the little valley in the easternmost half of his pate; and I found myself talking about women with webbed feet, and either he was “humoring” me (as my readers of the 1970s might say) or we were “bonding” (as my readers of the 1980s might say), but after a few moments, he nodded, and he nodded again, and then he smiled sadly. (Most people in 枉死城 smile sadly, when they smile at all.) Before long, we raised our glasses of carbonated pig-piss to toast the beauty of congenital syndactyly.
As Warlord Hua had told me, Hellers need to provoke their pain, never let it ease; the more they hurt, the more of their humanhood they might retain, and the longer they might live. Relver was no exception. He did not want to evaporate, and now that we were friends, he nakedly bared his own horrible tragedy, something that made him cry — or something that he told me in order that he might yet cry, just like a human with a human heart that would remain broken — and which, I allow, would have made me cry, if I were not here to remain immune to his humanness and to rob the man.
Mr. Relver was in life a fruit breeder and pomologist, some number of centuries ago, in a very warm part of Europe that to-day goes by a very different name, and is now a very different place. Mr. Relver was perhaps obsessive in his pomology, and by the age of sixty, he had bred a tree that bore fruit that resembled somewhat a pear, somewhat an apple, somewhat an orange, and which he called a diamond fruit. It bore only three pieces of fruit per year. This fruit was indeed very valuable, sought after by the regional ruler, who fashioned himself as a king, and who collected the fruit each year.
Relver’s parents died when he was yet young, and then his brother died, and before them, a girl whom he had loved, and whose webbed feet he had glimpsed but once. His younger sister followed them all to the River Styx, a sister who was twenty years his junior, and who thus left him in charge of her daughter, Clarina, the only one of his sister’s children to survive for more than a few months. His niece Clarina joined Relver’s household when she was twelve, and she married when she was sixteen.
“I am not a handsome handsome man,” Relver told me (unnecessarily). “I received merely a subsistence wage from the royal house in exchange for these few pieces of diamond fruit, to which I foolishly devoted my life. I am not even slightly charming or interesting, or witty or clever, and thus I have ever been unable to make up for my other deficiencies. And so I never expected to meet a wife, to have children. And true to expectation, I did not! I told myself that I did not care. I told myself that I had perhaps loved romantically once, this girl who died, and that perhaps it is my opinion that romantic love comes only once. But such things … perhaps they did not interest me only because they were beyond my grasp.”
He loved only his sister, and when she died, and his heart broke, he transferred that love to Clarina, and to her lover, Wretchel, whom she married, and who moved into Relver’s home.
He would have gladly given her the diamond fruit tree, free and clear of all debt, had she asked. He would have continued maintaining and harvesting the fruit for her without pay, if she had only asked. He would have bequeathed her his small house.
“After all,” Relver told me. “I had only her. She was all that was left of my sister, and of my family. I had no one and nothing else to love. Nothing else was of value to me.”
Indeed, as you can imagine, Clarina and her husband crushed Relver’s skull under the fruit tree, and his body lay beneath its boughs for a week before it was entirely stripped of flesh by carrion. The tree never bore its fruit again. The tree died in the following winter frost. The tree’s saplings died. The grafts died as well. And so no one ever tasted diamond fruit again, after Relver died.
“Hark,” said Relver. And I harked. The acapella singers ceased their singing. A trumpet blared in the far distance.
“The Midnight Sky-Market,” he said. “Join me, eh?”
I supposed that it would not hurt me to befriend the target of my scheme, although it might make me feel a bit guiltier about the whole ruse, guiltier even than hearing the tragedy of the diamond fruit tree.
I tapped my nose inconspicuously, and Master Yu nodded, from across the ballroom.
Relver and I stepped outside and walked through the deserted streets on the Albanadíqué outskirts. Here, the buildings were unlit, the shades drawn. Purple lightning cracked the ashen clouds overhead, no rain fell, and a grey purple dust drifted down from the sky. Relver turned left into a side street, then right onto an avenue, then straight ahead onto a curving lane, then straight over a muddy puddle onto the corner of a wide boulevard, and here he stopped at a winding tower that ascended into the dark clouds, and then farther above.
“A sky ‘scraper’,” Relver laughed. “You see? You understand this turn of phrase? It is an abode, as any abode, yet it scrapes the sky! Hence: sky ‘scraper’!”
Inside, I peered up at the winding staircase overhead, which to my eyes appeared endless, lit by a glow that bounced back and forth off the grey stone walls, and then we climbed, trudged tiredly to the very top, where at last we reached an expansive market just floating there, a city all to itself, infinite really, a barbershop mirror, holding an artifact of every significant memory of every wronged victim in Hell, past
, present or future. The market looked out over the mountains in the near North, and the grassy-grey wastelands that drifted off into the grey fog in the distant South. Above us, Yama appeared briefly between smoggy clouds to intone, solemnly, “Shoppers, enjoy the Midnight Sky-Market.” After a pause, he added, “And remember that the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated. Remember that there is no possible escape.”
Relver ignored the imperial white noise. “Here,” Relver said, “you can buy objects remembered, mementos lost.” He smiled sadly. “Scattered moments. For example” — and now he gestured across the vista, to a table staffed by one old woman, shrunken head buried in a sprawling and ragged shawl. A bowl of plump and to-the-eye luscious fruit sat on her table; the fruit glowed a reddish-gold.
“It is my diamond fruit,” Relver said. “In Malchut, it was unrivaled for sweetness. Down here, it is utterly inedible, of course — it is ridiculous to think of having delicious food in Hell — but it is always for sale here, and I might purchase it, just to look at and to think about.”
He sighed.
“To remember the happy moments spent in her branches,” and his voice cracked as he said this. Then he looked to me. “Do you see anything in this market? Anything that once belonged to you in happier times?”
I looked as we walked, but I saw nothing.
“I have never been a man of possessions,” I replied. I thought back to my childhood crammed into one of the dark tunnels in the back of the Old Brewery, a huge and hugely dilapidated abandoned shell of a building, filled with squatters and assorted thieves, and in which I had squatted as a guttersnipe; and I considered my later life on the lam, the broken-down shack in the desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Indeed: not a man of possessions.
“Pity,” Relver said. “It is good to remember.” He shrugged. “It keeps one human, you know.”
I said that I understood. One must endeavor to stay human. And needing things … this is one of the most human traits of all. Our love of stupid things.
But then I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and I turned and looked, and my breath caught.
An art dealer grinned at me across the crowd; pegged to a post behind him, a gorgeous oil painting showed a staggeringly lovely young begowned woman in a New York ballroom, an inscrutable smile on her rosy lips, who cheerfully ignored the legion of imploring and wealthy young gentlemen who surrounded her.
This was Lucy, during her years of Manhattan celebrity, but the painting was more beautiful than her rare photograph, and more truthful and authentic than the illustrations that appeared in the picture-papers, although I understood that she did not always entirely ignore every wealthy young gentleman (or old gentleman, for that matter), when the time came to pay bills that young Watt could not afford. Yet the painting captured her gentle heart, all those years ago … my dead Lucy.
“What is it, my friend?” Relver asked me.
“It is a painting that I wished to paint,” I said, not turning away. I laughed. “That is, if I had learned how to paint. I saw it in my mind’s eye many times. But I could not paint.” I laughed again. “And here it is.”
Relver nodded and asked if I would like to buy it, and I said that I would not; less regretful memories would be enough to keep me human.
At length, we found ourselves wandering Mulberry Bend, a narrow street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the middle of the century, and I led Relver past the clotheslines and hobos and stinking crowded cellar homes to 59½, which housed Bandits Roost, where I used to drink and fight from time to time when money was very tight. It was the way I remembered it from back in the 1850s, the smell of rotting wood crowded out by the smell of rotting men, which to me was not entirely unpleasant, because it reminded me of alcohol.
I began to tell him stories of the things that had once happened here. I knew somewhere in my head that this was not really the Roost on Mulberry Bend, but it was easy to forget for a happy moment. Relver smiled his discomforting smile (a smile with a little too much veiny gum and much too little genuine warmth), and he told me that he saw something else, a tavern some twenty-five miles outside his village, about halfway between his meager orchard and the castle, at which he occasionally stayed during his living lifetime, on route to visit the king with his consignment of fruit. He described it a bit: the oak barrels, the sloppy candles, the smell of horses, and the toothless and buxom daughters.
“You see it now?” I said, and he said that he did.
“You see the Roost,” he said. “I see something entirely different.”
After a while we left the saloon, arms about each other, perhaps singing a drunken song in the still-lively marketplace up here in the smoggy and smelly clouds, for we had by then shared so many stories and had imbibed so much demi-booze that I truly believed we were indeed drunk, and not just near-drunk; and, while I had begun this excursion hoping to feign friendship with my mark, I now truly believed that we were indeed friends, and that perhaps honesty in his particular case could accomplish all that I had set out to accomplish.
So without any guile at all, I asked Relver how he liked it here in Hell, and he noted that it was Hell, was it not?; and so I asked him if he would like to leave, and he wondered aloud who would not like to leave Hell, if indeed it were possible; and so I told him that he possessed a gem that could help us buy an army that might free us, he and I, Relver and O’Hugh. I then described the gem, my smile bright with enthusiasm, my soul filled with hope.
Relver’s face turned darker than the Hell-night. A flash of lightning, blue and reddish black like an angry bruise, lit the whole mountain range, and a blast of disapproving thunder rattled my bones a moment later.
I’ve made mistakes in my life, sure.
Chapter 18
I suppose, now, I am not really surprised by Relver’s transformation. I guess it was not really a transformation at all. He had been wronged terribly, but this didn’t mean that he would henceforth do right. Being a victim didn’t give him empathy. There is perhaps not really any such thing as a “friend,” it seems to me now, from the vantage point of the waning months of 1936. Just periodic alliances. But to my disadvantage, that is not how I felt back then, in 1880, in Hell.
To his left, a hot dog stand; to his right, a Victorian doll shop; and behind him, a towering shop called Mollie’s Junk, filled with very specific memories (a photograph of a smiling woman, mid-fifties, a little bony; a dog-eared copy of Wymps by Evelyn Sharp; a whirligig; a rolling hoop).
Relver fell to all fours, and he became a great white dog, with red eyes and ferocious teeth too large for its drooling mouth. At the same time, Relver rose into the air, and he became a mythical firebird, who spread great red wings, which cast a glowing shadow over the market. The bird squawked, and the market shook; the dog snarled, his lips quivering lines, drool dripping to the dark pavement.
I turned and ran straight at the dog, which I hit square in the snout, and then I leaped into the air and swatted the firebird, before crashing straight through Mollie’s glass window. I landed gently, not on the junk shop floor, but on green grass in front of a brick house, alongside an identical brick house, and another, hundreds of them, all the same, stretching to the horizon, all dark and empty, and behind me, Relver, the Relver-bird and the Relver-dog strode briskly and flew and bounded at my heels. I ran up the walk to one of the houses, I kicked in the old rotten door, and I found myself on a stone street, bordered by two stone walls.
I ran till I reached the bank of a winding river; the firebird appeared in the air on the eastern side of the river, and the white dog appeared on the western side of the river, and so I dived in. I allowed myself to sink, my eyes wide open, till I reached the very bottom, and I sat in the middle of a rippling abyssal plain in a salt water sea, surrounded by submarine waterfalls on two sides, and, on the other two sides, black smokers — hydrothermal vents blasting out black seawater from beneath the plain. I flapped along the ocean floor, kicking up dust and ma
nganese nodules and startling the brainless sea pigs sucking on biogenic ooze, and the blind, jawless hagfish, groping about for corpses; and when I came to a cave, I scurried inside. The cave had some pockets of air that bubbled up from beneath the cave floor, and above me was a great stone shaft — a sort of chimney in the ocean depths. I kicked, and I headed upwards towards the sky. When I burst out of the sea, I found myself in a watering trough to the side of Albanadíqué’s main through-road, gasping for air. I stepped out of the trough sheepishly, my dirty tuxedo dripping, my gun waterlogged.
I staggered across the street and hobbled into the tearoom, which was busy and humming in the early morning, just-past Midnight-Market hour, although a yellow foggy light — London at mid-afternoon, I believe — oozed through the dusty windows, and I realized that in here, it was not the middle of the night, it was always English tea-time. There was a sort of corroded elegance in here, in Hell’s English tea parlor, and the customers sipped from cracked china and seemed to smile and laugh with some strained jolliness at what I imagined were jokes of a sort, but still, as always, they had sad eyes, eyes that expected eternal mediocrity.
I pushed my way to the bar of once-polished, now splintery cherrywood from the early years of the 19th century, where a toothy and blue-haired grande-dame dispensed finger sandwiches. (Have you ever had a finger sandwich? It’s not what you think it is! It is not made out of fingers. It is a tiny, delicate and stupid little sandwich made out of cucumbers and mayonnaise and what-not. It does not fill one’s stomach.)
When I reached the front of the line, the blue-haired grande-dame handed me a finger sandwich, which I tossed in my mouth and crunched, and then remarked that I was looking for information. At that, the blue-haired grande-dame looked up, recognized me and said, with distaste, “You’re that fugitive crook!” to which I replied, “Not anymore — all I’m cheating these days is Death.”
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 17
