“They don’t know that. No one knows that for sure. She is missing,” the violinist says, hissing the last word between clenched teeth.
“Well, then she’s been missing for quite some time,” the Collector replies, feeling the smallest bit braver now and beginning to suspect he hasn’t quite overplayed his hand.
“But they do not know that she’s been murdered. They don’t know that. No one ever found her body,” and then Ellen decides that she’s said far too much and stares down at the fat man’s violin. She can’t imagine how she ever thought it a lovely thing, only a moment or two before, this grotesque parody of a violin resting in her lap. It’s more like a gargoyle, she thinks, or a sideshow freak, or a sick, sick joke, and suddenly she wants very badly to wash her hands.
“Please forgive me,” the Collector says, sounding as sincere and contrite as any lonely man in a yellow house by the sea has ever sounded. “I am unaccustomed to company. I forget myself and say things I shouldn’t. Please, Ellen. Play it for me. You’ve come all this way, and I would so love to hear you play. It would be such a pity if I’ve gone and spoiled it all with a few inconsiderate words. I so admire your work.”
“No one admires my work,” she replies, wondering how long it would take the taxi to show up and carry her back over the muddy, murky river, past the rows of empty warehouses to the depot, and how long she’d have to wait for the next train to New York. “I still don’t even understand how you found me.”
And at this opportunity to redeem himself, the Collector’s face brightens, and he leans across the desk towards her. “Then I will tell you, if that will put your mind at ease. I saw you play at an art opening in Manhattan, you and your sister, a year or so back. At a gallery on Mercer Street. It was called…damn, it’s right on the tip of my tongue.”
“Eyecon,” Ellen says, almost whispering. “The name of the gallery is Eyecon.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. Thank you. I thought it was such a very silly name for a gallery, but then I’ve never cared for puns and wordplay. It was at a reception for a French painter, Albert Perrault, and I confess I found him quite completely hideous, and his paintings were dreadful, but I loved listening to the two of you play. I called the gallery, and they were nice enough to tell me how I could contact you.”
“I didn’t like his paintings, either. That was the last time we played together, my sister and I,” Ellen says, and she presses a thumb to the ammonite shell that forms the violin’s scroll.
“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry, Ellen. I wasn’t trying to dredge up bad memories.”
“It’s not a bad memory,” she says, wishing it were all that simple and that were exactly the truth, and then she reaches for the violin’s bow, which is still lying in the case lined with silk dyed the color of ripe pomegranates.
“I’m sorry,” the Collector says again, certain now that he hasn’t frightened her away, that everything is going precisely as planned. “Please, I only want to hear you play again.”
“I’ll need to tune it,” Ellen tells him, because she’s come this far, and she needs the money, and there’s nothing the fat man has said that doesn’t add up.
“Naturally,” he replies. “I’ll go to the kitchen and make us another pot of tea, and you can call me whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll need a tuning fork,” she says, because she hasn’t seen any sign of a piano in the yellow house. “Or if you have a metronome that has a tuner, that would work.”
The Collector promptly produces a steel tuning fork from another of the drawers, and slides it across the desk to the violinist. She thanks him, and when he’s left the room and she’s alone with the ammonite violin and all the tall cases filled with fossils and the amber wash of incandescent bulbs, she glances at a window and sees that it’s already dark outside. I will play for him, she thinks. I’ll play on his violin, and drink his tea, and smile, and then he’ll pay me for my time and trouble. I’ll go back to the city, and tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be glad that I didn’t chicken out. Tomorrow or the next day, it’ll all seem silly, that I was afraid of a sad old man who lives in an ugly yellow house and collects rocks.
“I will,” she says out loud. “That’s exactly how it will go,” and then Ellen begins to tune the ammonite violin.
And after he brings her a rickety old music stand, something that looks like it has survived half a century of high-school marching bands, he sits behind his desk, sipping a fresh cup of tea, and she sits in the overlapping pools of light from the display cases. He asked for Paganini; specifically, he asked for Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in E. She would have preferred something contemporary – Górecki, maybe, or Philip Glass, a little something she knows from memory – but he had the sheet music for Paganini, and it’s his violin, and he’s the one who’s writing the check.
“Now?” she asks, and he nods his head.
“Yes, please,” he replies and raises his tea cup as if to toast her.
So Ellen lifts the violin, supporting it with her left shoulder, bracing it firmly with her chin, and studies the sheet music a moment or two more before she begins. Introduzione, allegro marziale, and she wonders if he expects to hear all three movements, start to finish, or if he’ll stop her when he’s heard enough. She takes a deep breath and begins to play.
From his seat at the desk, the Collector closes his eyes as the lilting voice of the ammonite violin fills the room. He closes his eyes tightly and remembers another winter night, almost an entire year come and gone since then, but it might only have been yesterday, so clear are his memories. His collection of suffocations may indeed be more commonplace, as he has been led to conclude, but it is also the less frequently indulged of his two passions. He could never name the date and place of each and every ammonite acquisition, but in his brain the Collector carries a faultless accounting of all the suffocations. There have been sixteen, sixteen in twenty-one years, and now it has been almost one year to the night since the most recent. Perhaps, he thinks, he should have waited for the anniversary, but when the package arrived from Belgium, his enthusiasm and impatience got the better of him. When he wrote the violinist his lilac-scented note, he wrote “at your earliest possible convenience” and underlined “earliest” twice.
And here she is, and Paganini flows from out the ammonite violin just as it flowed from his car stereo that freezing night, one year ago, and his heart is beating so fast, so hard, racing itself and all his bright and breathless memories.
Don’t let it end, he prays to the sea, whom he has faith can hear the prayers of all her supplicants and will answer those she deems worthy. Let it go on and on and on. Let it never end.
He clenches his fists, digging his short nails deep into the skin of his palms, and bites his lip so hard that he tastes blood. And the taste of those few drops of his own life is not so very different from holding the sea inside his mouth.
At last, I have done a perfect thing, he tells himself, himself and the sea and the ammonites and the lingering souls of all his suffocations. So many years, so much time, so much work and money, but finally I have done this one perfect thing. And then he opens his eyes again, and also he opens the top middle drawer of his desk and takes out the revolver that once belonged to his father, who was a Gloucester fisherman who somehow managed never to collect anything at all.
Her fingers and the bow dance wild across the strings, and in only a few minutes Ellen has lost herself inside the giddy tangle of harmonics and drones and double stops, and if ever she has felt magic – true magic – in her art, then she feels it now. She lets her eyes drift from the music stand and the printed pages, because it is all right there behind her eyes and burning on her fingertips. She might well have written these lines herself and then spent half her life playing at nothing else, they rush through her with such ease and confidence. This is ecstasy, and this is abandon, and this is the tumble and roar of a thousand other emotions she seems never to have fully felt before this night. The stra
nge violin no longer seems unusually heavy; in fact, it hardly seems to have any weight at all.
Perhaps there is no violin, she thinks. Perhaps there never was a violin, only my hands and empty air, and that’s all it takes to make music like this.
Language is language is language, the fat man said, and so these chords have become her words. No, not words, but something so much less indirect than the clumsy interplay of her tongue and teeth, larynx and palate. They have become, simply, her language, as they ever have been. Her soul speaking to the world, and all the world need do in return is listen.
She shuts her eyes, no longer requiring them to grasp the progression from one note to the next, and at first there is only the comfortable darkness behind her lids, which seems better matched to the music than all the distractions of her eyes.
Don’t let it stop, she thinks, not praying, unless this is a prayer to herself, for the violinist has never seen the need for gods. Please, let it be like this forever. Let this moment never end, and I will never have to stop playing, and there will never again be silence or the noise of human thoughts and conversation.
It can’t be that way, Ellen, her sister whispers, not whispering in her ear, but from somewhere within the Paganini concerto, or from within the ammonite violin, or both at once. I wish I could give you that. I would give you that, if it were mine to give.
And then Ellen sees, or hears, or simply understands in this language which is her language, as language is language is language, the fat man’s hands about her sister’s throat. Her sister dying somewhere cold near the sea, dying all alone except for the company of her murderer, and there is half an instant when she almost stops playing.
No, her sister whispers, and that one word comes like a blazing gash across the concerto’s whirl. Ellen doesn’t stop playing, and she doesn’t open her eyes, and she watches as her lost sister slowly dies.
The music is a typhoon gale flaying rocky shores to gravel and sand, and the violinist lets it spin and rage, and she watches as the fat man takes four of her sister’s fingers and part of a thighbone, strands of her ash-blonde hair, a vial of oil boiled and distilled from the fat of her breasts, a pink-white section of small intestine – all these things and the five fossils from off an English beach to make the instrument he wooed her here to play for him. And now there are tears streaming hot down her cheeks, but still Ellen plays the violin that was her sister, and still she doesn’t open her eyes.
The single gunshot is very loud in the room, and the display cases rattle, and a few of the ammonites slip off their Lucite stands and clatter against wood or glass or other spiraled shells.
And finally the violinist opens her eyes.
And the music ends as the bow slides from her fingers and falls to the floor at her feet.
“No,” she says, “please don’t let it stop, please,” but the echo of the revolver and the memory of the concerto are so loud in her ears that her own words are almost lost to her.
That’s all, her sister whispers, louder than any suicide’s gun, soft as a midwinter night coming on, gentle as one unnoticed second bleeding into the next. I’ve shown you, and now there isn’t any more.
Across the room, the Collector still sits at his desk, but now he’s slumped a bit in his chair, and his head is thrown back so that he seems to be staring at something on the ceiling. Blood spills from the black cavern of his open mouth and drips to the floor.
There isn’t any more.
And when she’s stopped crying and is quite certain that her sister will not speak to her again, that all the secrets she has any business seeing have been revealed, the violinist retrieves the dropped bow and stands, then walks to the desk and returns the ammonite violin to its case. She will not give it to the police when they arrive, after she has gone to the kitchen to call them, and she will not tell them that it was the fat man who gave it to her. She will take it back to Brooklyn, and they will find other incriminating things in another room in the yellow house and so have no need of the violin and these stolen shreds of her sister. The Collector has kindly written everything down in three books bound in red leather, all the names and dates and places, and there are other souvenirs, besides. And she will never try to put this story into words, for words have never come easily to her, and like the violin, the story is hers now and hers alone.
For Robin Hazen
THE AMMONITE VIOLIN (MURDER BALLAD NO. 4)
Sometimes we wear our inspirations on our sleeve, and they are not the least bit cryptic. That’s surely the case with this story, a retelling of a classic murder ballad, “The Twa Sisters,” the earliest known variant of which appears in 1656. My childhood in the foothills of the Appalachians was filled with murder ballads, what my mother called dead-baby songs. As an adult, they inform my fiction. Special thanks to Indrid Em (Robin Hazen), a luthier who gave me invaluable technical advice while I was writing “The Ammonite Violin.”
A Season of Broken Dolls
August 14, 2027
Sabit’s the one with a hard-on for stitchwork, not me. It is not exactly (or at all) my particular realm of expertise, not my cuppa, not my scene – as the beatniks used to say, back there in those happy Neolithic times. I mean the plethora of Lower Manhattan flesh-art dives like Guro/Guro or Twist or that pretentious little shitstain way down on Pearl – Corpus Ex Machina – the one that gets almost as much space in the police blotters as in the glossy snip-art rags. Me, I’m still laboring alone or nearly so in the Dark Ages, and she never lets me forget it. My unfashionable and unprofitable preoccupation with mere canvas and paint, steel and plaster, all that which has been deemed démodé, passé, Post-Relevant, all that which is fit only to fill up musty old museum vaults and public galleries, gathering more dust even than my career. You still write on a goddamn keyboard, for chris’sakes, she laughs. You’re the only woman I ever fucked made being a living fossil a goddamn point of pride. And then Sabit checks for my pulse – two fingers pressed gently to a wrist or the side of my throat – bcause, hey, maybe I’m not a living fossil at all. Maybe I’m that other kind, like Pollack and Mondrian, Henry Moore and poor old Man Ray. No, no, no, the blood’s still flowing sluggishly along, she smiles and lights a cigarette. Too bad. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, my love. Sabit likes to talk almost as much as she likes to watch. It’s not as though the bitch has a mark on her hide anywhere, not as though she’s anything but a tourist with a hard-on, a fetishist who cannot ever get enough of her kink. Prick her for a crimson bead and the results would come back same as mine, 98% the same as any chimpanzee. She knows how much contempt is reserved in those quarters for tourists and trippers, but I think that only makes her more zealous. She exhales, and smoke lingers like a unearned halo about her face. I should have dumped her months ago, but I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m just as addicted to sex as she is to nicotine and pills and vicarious stitchwork. She calls herself a poet, but she has never let me read a word she’s written, if she’s ever written a word. I found her a year ago, almost a year ago, found her in a run-down titty bar getting fucked up on vodka and laudanum and speed and the too-firm silicone breasts of women who might have been the real thing – even if their perfect boobs were not – or might only have been cheap japandroids. She followed me home, fifteen years my junior, and the more things change, the more things stay the way they were day before day before yesterday, day before I met Sabit and her slumberous Arabian eyes. My sloe-eyed stitch-fiend of a girlfriend, and I have her, and she has me, and we’re as happy as happy can be, and I pretend it means something more than orgasms and not being alone, something more than me annoying her and her taunting and insulting me. Now she’s telling me there’s a new line-up down @ Corpus Ex Machina (hereafter known simply as CeM), and we have to be there tomorrow night. We have to be there, she says. The Trenton Group is showing, and last time the Trenton Group showed, there was almost a riot, so we have to be there. I have deadlines that have nothing whatsoever to do with that constantly revo
lving meat-market spectacle, and in a moment I’ll finish this entry & then I’ll tell her that, and she’ll tell me we have to be there, we have to be there, & there will be time to finish my articles later. There always is, & I’m never late. Never late enough to matter. I’ll go with her, bcause I do not trust her to go alone – not go alone and come back here again – she’ll tell me that, and she’ll be right as fucking rain. Her smug triumph, well that’s a given. Just as my obligatory refusal followed by inevitable, reluctant acquiescence is also a given. We play by the same rules every time. Now she’s on about some scandal @ Guro/Guro – chicanery and artifice, prosthetics, and she says, They’re all a bunch of gidding poseurs, the shitheels run that sorry dump. Someone ought to burn it to the ground for this. You know how to light a match, I reply, & she rolls her dark eyes @ me. No rain today. No rain since…June. The sky at noon is the color of rust, and I wish it were winter. Enough for now. Maybe she’ll shut up for 10 or 15 if I fuck her.
August 16, 2027
“You’re into that whole scene, right?” Which only shows to go once again that my editor still has her head rammed so far up her ass that her farts smell like toothpaste. But I said yeah, sure, bcause she wanted someone with cred on the Guro/Guro story, the stitch chicanery, allegations of fraud among the freaks, & what else was I supposed to say? I can’t remember the last time I had the nerve to turn down a paying assignment. Must have been years before I met Sabit, at least. So, yeah, I tagged along last night, just like she wanted – both of them wanted – she & she, but @ least I can say it’s work, and Berlin picked up the tab. Sabit’s out, so I don’t have her yammering in my goddamn ear, an hour to myself, perhaps, half an hour, however long it takes her to get back with dinner. I wanted to put something down, something that isn’t in the notes and photos I’ve already filed with the pre-edit gleets. Fuck. I’ve been popping caps from Sabit’s pharmacopoeia all goddamn day long, I don’t even know what, the baby-blue ones she gets $300/two dozen from Peru, the ones she says calm her down but they’re not calming me down. They haven’t even dulled the edge, so far as I can tell. But, anyway, there we were @ CeM, in the crowded Pearl St. warehouse passing itself off as a slaughterhouse or a zoo or an exhibition or what the fuck ever, and there’s this bird from Tokyo, and I never got her name, but she had eyes all the colors of peacock feathers, iridescent eyes, and she recognized me. Some monied bird with pretty peacock eyes. She’d read the series I wrote in ‘21 when the city finally gave up and let the sea have the subway. I read a lot, she said. I might have been a journalist myself, she said. That sort of shit. Thought she was going to ask me to sign a goddamn cocktail napkin. And I’m smiling & nodding yes, bcause that’s agency policy, be nice to the readers, don’t feed the pigeons, whatever. But I can’t take my eyes off the walls. The walls are new. They were just walls last time Sabit dragged me down to one of her snip affairs. Now they’re alive, every square inch, mottled shades of pink and gray and whatever you call that shade between pink and gray. Touch them (Sabit must have touched them a hundred times) and they twitch or sprout goose bumps. They sweat, those walls. And the peacock girl was in one ear, and Sabit was in the other, the music so loud I was already getting a headache before my fourth drink, and I was trying to stop looking at those walls. Pig, Sabit told me later in the evening. It’s all just pig, and she sounded disappointed. Most of this is in the notes, though I didn’t say how unsettling I found those walls of skin. I save the revulsion for my own dime. Sabit says they’re working on adding functional genitalia and…fuck. I hear her at the door. Later, then. She has to shut up and go to sleep eventually.
Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea Page 12
