by John Klima
What followed was, to some, unpardonable. To others it was as inevitable as big fish eating little fish. Not only did he have his way with Mishby’s wife, but afterward, when the tap dancer lunged at him with a pen knife, he did it so brutally to the lanky young man that from that day forward Mishby had to go about on a board with wheels. “He did it to me without remorse,” Mishby now attests, “and no one came to my rescue. In fact, they cheered him on as I screamed in agony. I guess when you can do it the way he does, no rules apply.”
He continued to work for a few years at places like The Republic, Sweet Regrets, A Slice of Green Moon, which was, in those days, located between Front and Chase in the diamond district. Then one night after his act, he was approached by a heavy, well-dressed man, sporting a cane.
“When I see you do it, I am humbled,” said the man.
“Naturally,” he said.
“My name is Arthur Silven, and I would like to represent you. Here’s my card. I believe the scope of your talent deserves a more fitting venue.”
“You’re a fat pig,” was his response.
“But I’m a pig with a bite,” said Silven.
They shook hands, and for the next five years he did it under the auspices of Silven Entertainment.
He did it in concert halls and stadiums as people in the back rows and top bleachers looked on with binoculars. He did it before royalty and heads of state, and dignitaries of foreign powers courted his friendship. The money poured in, and he and Silven became wealthy beyond measure. By the end of five years, though, he had done it so much, so well, and for so long, that he felt he might like to not do it for a while. Silven would hear none of it and threatened a breach of contract suit. So, one foggy night, he broke into the entrepreneur’s house and did it to Silven so completely they had to clean up what was left of the agent with a shovel.
Of course, he had a rock-solid alibi of having been at a magic show all that evening. There were many at the event who swore they did see him there, and it was recounted that the magician, an old acquaintance of his from his shows at The Republic even called him up on stage at one point, had him get into a box with a sliding curtain, and made him disappear for a solid half hour.
He never served any time for the death of Silven, although the D.A. did fleetingly consider prosecution on circumstantial evidence. As it turned out the case was determined to be too weak. When the photographs of Silven’s mangled form hit the tabloids and television, though, the general public was not convinced of his innocence and was put off by the viciousness the attack displayed. As one elderly woman described her reaction to the incident and attendant photos, “It gave me a feeling like when I see a piece of meat at a barbecue that has cooked too long and the flies are risking their lives to get to it, kids have dropped marshmallows onto the hot coals, and there’s grease burning too.” The international press started referring to him as “The Savage American.” The noted ethical philosopher, Trenton Du Block, came out against him as did Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
He walked away from it all and built himself a mansion in the swamps of Louisiana. There, amidst the forbidding black waters and moss-strewn cypress, he shrouded himself from the world. It is said that he raised llamas and peacocks behind the high walls of his estate. The only person from the outside world who still had access to him was his valet, Ruben Charles. Charles has claimed that even he, himself, very rarely got to see his employer during these years. “I usually took my orders from a voice that issued from a darkened room,” he’s said.
“At night,” Charles wrote in his memoirs, “I would hear him rummaging around the mansion. Then I would hear him in the backyard, doing it to one of the peacocks. The screams were ungodly, and I would cower beneath my covers. When I slept it was with one eye open. Make no mistake, the day finally came when he did it to me. It was in the trophy room. He charged out from behind a stuffed bear and did it to me like there was no tomorrow.”
Charles could not honestly say as to whether his boss had been doing it on a daily basis during their time in the swamp. All the valet could testify to was that the day after a bad storm, when the brick wall was knocked down in one spot by a falling tree and dozens of alligators had invaded the sanctuary, slaughtering and devouring all of the livestock, his employer did it on the veranda, overlooking the carnage, with magnificent precision and beauty.
In September of that year, he let Charles go and sold the mansion to the alleged head of a drug cartel. After this, he disappeared for a time. Scattered sightings of him surfaced now and then over a period of the next few years. Individuals told of encounters with him in far-flung locations of the globe. It’s since been discovered that certain tribes in the interior of New Guinea carve figures that seem to bare a perfect likeness to him in the act of doing it.
Some believe that he lived a mundane existence with a woman in an apartment in a small town on the Canadian border. Supposedly he’d gone back to working as a night watchman. Judith Nelson, the woman with whom he’d purportedly been living publicly denies having ever met him, but her family and friends say that she had, for this time period, often been seen in the presence of a strange man who fits his description. One of Nelson’s subsequent lovers claims that her body still bore the marks of it having been done to her repeatedly.
When he definitively surfaced again on a street corner in the small town of Fortescue in southern New Jersey, he looked much older. His thinning hair was long and he wore it in a pig tail. A gray beard and the crow’s-feet around his eyes made him appear far less frightening than he had in his youth. It was noted that he’d switched to a filtered cigarette. Still his body was in near-perfect condition, and one could tell from watching him do it that he’d been practicing all along.
The small town audiences he performs for these days, traveling in his van from street corner to street corner, say that to see him do it now is no longer the sublime terror, the agonizing beauty, it had once been. The effect, as I have experienced it myself, has become one of precision and clarity, an exquisite longing for a paradise lost, an empathetic magnate for petty paranoia.
When I went to interview him for the first time down on Money Island at the southernmost tip of Jersey, I told him how closely I’d followed his career and that I was thinking about writing a magazine article based on his life. He told me I was in luck, because at his first show that evening on the library field, he was going to do it to the town’s mayor. “I thought you didn’t do that sort of thing anymore,” I said to him. He looked into my eyes and waved his hand in disgust. “Hey, do it to yourself,” he said and walked away.
That evening in the summer heat, beneath a huge oak tree on the library field, the people of Money Island gathered to watch him do it to the mayor. He did it so gently, and with such care, a young man in front of me broke into tears. The mayor gasped with delight as if before her eyes she was witnessing a passing parade of priceless treasures, and when he was done with her, she seemed to glow. The mayor declared a town holiday in honor of his art and later, on the high school football field, I watched in awe as he did it again, this time alone, beneath a sky ablaze with fireworks.
Milk and Apples
Catherynne M. Valente
She was not my child—and yet.
From the day I walked beneath the fluttering red flags and bronze-cragged portcullis, frightened as a tree before the axe, this infant was put into my arms, pushed against my breast, her shock of black hair a gleam against my trembling skin. I was so young then—child bride on my child throne, threaded up in violet and gold, gowns meant for another, gowns which, even laced their tightest, could not produce the womanly form of their last owner. I sat, velvet and silk puddling around my hips, sliding off my slim shoulders, with a baby sprawled on my lap, and the hall was empty as a nunnery. I was a wet nurse, married into this Teutonic mausoleum because I had been wicked, yes, because I had borne a dead daughter, I had squeezed a little pale corpse from my body as though I were nothing but a fat coffin,
and buried it in the snow-hardened fields.
So, you see, I was wicked, from the beginning. There was a man and a child when there ought to have been nothing but candies and horse-lessons. My dresses had to be let out, and the huntsman was banished from any house of stone or straw. I stood over the purplish, frozen creature—half-fish, half-snail—as a pot-scrubber from the kitchens lowered it into the icy scrabble, into the potato roots and carrot seeds, curled around itself as if to protect its tender skin from worms, its black hair already icicles breaking off under the weight of shoveled soil. Its hands were doubled into fists, a little row of perfect fingernails like pearls in a spoilt oyster-bed. The snow did not melt on my cheeks, and I did not weep.
Alone in all the world, this one king wanted a wife whose breasts were already clotted with milk, whose flesh groaned childward. He looked at my teeth when we met, my pink gums. He ran his hands over the welts still blazing on my back from the whore’s whip. And under my father’s rheumy eye he squeezed a white drop from my left breast, his scorpion-hand hot and dry. He wiped his fingers clean on my penitent skirt.
My family was grateful for the favor. I came with twelve head of cattle, and I, swollen heifer, thirteenth. I was lead out of my home with all those brown-hooved cows, and I did not weep.
On a twisted little throne of willow and wicker they put her into my arms, white as the ground over my gray-navelled daughter, lips too red for infancy. They put her into my arms and drew the curtains. I was alone with her. This was my wedding night—I did not receive the king in my bed, only his child in a drafty, stony hall where no water or bread was brought me.
I did not even have to loosen the golden laces, so ridiculous were those clown-cloaks of my bridal bower. My breasts were hard and shrieking with their weight of milk, their stoppered grief. My body was taut and grasping, straining in its dumb carnality to replace its missing self. She cried, her little reedy cry, and her plump hand fluttered against my face. She turned upward, black eyes narrowly open, like doors to some secret place, searching blindly for the mother-warmth. I had none of it to give. Snow still settled on my face, unyielding. But her plaintive, innocent throat worked noiselessly, swallowing milk that was as dead in the earth as my own piscine girl.
I eased a cold and swollen nipple into her scarlet mouth. Her brow eased and she began to suckle with a swift, greedy thirst. The tug of her swallowing was stronger than I expected. Slowly, I drained out of myself, into her, and the bell-pain in my chest tolled silently, fading into echoes.
I put my hand to her dark, soft head, and wept.
*
She was not my child, and yet, as winters swept by like blackbirds, she looked more and more like me. Did I wish this, somewhere in my sorrow? Did I incant some old rhyme while I slept, alone in my high-postered bed, and will her face into this delicate mirror? I have seen the paintings of her mother—how could I not, when my stone-bricked room is hung with them like boughs of yellow apples—and she was bright and gold as a young lion. Yet the girl grew dark and slight, pale as glass, and her eyes were huge, huge and black.
I became a virgin again—cobwebs strung themselves diamond-wet within me, and the king never came to my room, except to see his daughter fed. And fed she was, into her fifteenth year, for he would not wean her against her will, and the little girl came to me with smiles and kisses and bows in her hair, every day more radiant and flushed, her curls as bright as coal half-turned to diamonds. She fastened up the laces herself when she had finished, for the gowns had long since come to fit. She was always careful not to hurt me with her teeth, and sometimes, when she had done, she would lay her head against my neck, and sleep with her hands twined in my own jet hair. This was all I had of my husband, his lupine grin, his feral eyes clapped on me, on her, as she shut her eyes in bliss.
At night, I could hear them dancing together in the downstairs rooms, to some blaze-noted tarantella, and the fire crackled beneath their laughter.
I do not remember when the mirror arrived. Among the forest of portraits that showed the former queen—on her wedding day, on her favorite horse, gravid and glorying—was suddenly a cool glass, its frame a knotted kind of silver. Once it was there, leaning heavy as a churchbell against the gray wall where the Sun Queen Regnant had hung, it seemed as though it had always leaned there, and no canvas emblazoned with the dead woman cloaked in gold had ever caught the morning dust. In the procession of identical women, bright as lamps, was now one dark pillar, with skin that never drank sun, a figure ruined by fifteen years of nursing lashed sagging and chafed into a widow’s witch-black gown.
I touched my face—I thought, perhaps, I had been beautiful. Once, on the day they put my fish-child into the potato field. That day someone might have painted me, and called my sweet face sainted. But this creature, claw-fingered and sallow-throated, flesh kept on bone only by brackish water and bread soaked in pigfat, this creature was a deathshead, all its beauty drawn out as through from a silver well, drawn out by lips too red for a child.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I whispered, who is the fairest one of all?
Crowded by the golden ghost in all her faces, the mirror rippled, and showed my own face—as I was, before I was wicked, with a high blush in my cheeks, and endless rivers of crow-wing hair curling at my waist. I watched myself tend a clutch of roosters in a green apron. I watched myself laugh, and sweat prettily in the sun.
Oh, I whispered, oh.
*
It was not hard to call him. A boiled dove, a few drops of my blood, a yellow stone laid in the moon’s path for three nights—and he was there, gray-eared dogs at his side, below my tower. He was older than I liked to see—he drooped in gray like his hounds, and his skin was beaten into bronze by sun and rain. But even so, after all these years, he could hardly look at me.
She might have been ours, I told him. But she is not. She is innocent. She knows only the taste of milk and the smell of my collar. You mustn’t hurt her, I said, only wean her from me so that I can step away from this stair of bone. Take her into the potato field, into the snow, and harden her flesh, lay out her heart in the ice and mud, as you laid out mine when it was knotted up for you like a pretty red present.
Save me, I said. I am in need.
The huntsman nodded, weary as cattle, his head heavy with debt.
But when he returned, he held only a little wooden box with a copper seal.
It was not that she was not beautiful, he said, or that I did not want to obey you. But she wept so, and clutched her dress around her, and lay whimpering like a deer in the whirling snow. She begged me and her eyes were huge, huge and black, and I could not do it. I let her go, and she ran into the green forest, her hair streaming behind her like a coal furnace coughing.
I was stricken; the king would surely throw me from the tower and watch my skull wet the garden bed.
I am sorry, he said. But I did bring her back, I brought her back to you.
And he pressed the wooden box into my hand, disappearing into the fog with his mud-pawed hounds padding behind him.
Inside lay a mound of bones, startlingly white, tiny and delicate as those of a fish.
*
Without her, I still felt her mouth, phantom, silent, hungry. The shade of her pulled at me with lips of air.
The king did not come. He closed himself into a garret of portraits, of women black and gold, and the only sound was his bellows, wheezing through the walls. He did not dash my brains out on the floor, he did not, at long last, sink his grief into me. Without her, I was of less use than any oil-stroked effigy. The tower was empty of all but wind and painted queens. And the mirror, which showed the other me huddled in the crook of a willow, whipped red and bloody by the cold. I tried to reach through the glass, to touch her, but the mirror allows only so much. She is bound there, under the silver.
The stone whistled and coughed, and the damp settled in.
The king did not come.
And the king did not go to the woman in the
mirror. Not as she crouched in her tree, not as she stumbled through the wild wood with her arms upraised, scratched and whipped. Not as she starved under green boughs heavy with apples—poor, innocent thing, who did not know how to eat if it was not from my breast. Not as she found a burned-out carcass of a thatched hut, and not as she hid herself there, terror-mad, keening back and forth, clutching her bruised knees, her hair a savage cloak of snarls.
She was my daughter. How could I not go to her?
I crept down the tower stair in my worn gown which looked finally what it had been from the first—a funeral shroud. My bones rattled like beans in a gourd. When the sun touched my skin for the first time since I was a bride, I could feel the light settling into strange new wrinkles and crevices—I was, at last, a hag, bent and broken, a pitcher poured by husband into child. And under a black hood, I fled into the forest, yellow teeth gleaming.
As I went, I pulled apples from the trees, into my dusky apron, and if I used a glamour or two to make them redder, rounder, brighter, it was only to make them beautiful for her, more delicious than the milk she had drunk in delight for years upon years.
*
Mother, she croaked. Mother.
Out of the charcoal hut, blackened and skeletal, she crawled, thin as a leaf of paper, her eyes spilling over with relief, scarlet lips trembling. She put her arms up to me like a babe tired of walking.
Mother.
I stroked her pollen-clotted hair, combed the gold from the black, and crooned to her, rocked her sweetly, whispered nonsense names and tuneless songs. She scrabbled at my bodice for the laces, ravenous of tooth and throat, and her fingernails, perfect as a line of pearls, cut into my dry and page-brown skin. I pushed her hands away, closed her mouth with a hooked claw. Oh, and the betrayal in her eyes! Huge and black, they blinked in disbelief, suddenly shattered and faithless. She wept, and tried to pull at my waist, and her weeping became sobbing, and her sobbing became screams.
