Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she says, smiling.

  “I was remembering that day on the road,” I tell her, and her smiles fades, but slowly, by increments. Not all at once.

  “The day after you told me about Jupiter, and the floaters and the sinkers and the hunters. The day after you showed me those pictures.”

  “They were only paintings,” she says. “A thought exercise, what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment.” I say I didn’t know she spoke German, and she informs me that she doesn’t, that she picked the word up in a seminar on Schrödinger’s cat and Maxwell’s demon, that sort of thing. “Intellectual masturbation,” she adds.

  She frowns and waves a dismissive hand, meaning we should move along to another topic of conversation, because we’re getting too, too near whatever did or didn’t happen that day on Wolf’s Den Road. But those paintings, they’re fixed here in my mind’s eye, and it’s obviously easier for her to move along than it is for me. I can’t say why. Maybe she’s stopped having the dreams. I don’t ask, though, because if she has, I’d rather not know that I’m alone with them now.

  She’s behind the wheel, and I’m sitting beside her, my face pressed to the window. The glass is chilly. Glancing up, it doesn’t seem so unlikely that someone might open her eyes wide enough to choke to death on a November sky.

  “The idea’s very simple, really,” she said, the night she showed me Adolf Schaller’s paintings, printed in one of Carl Sagan’s books. “We tend to assume life needs a terrestrial matrix to evolve, because that’s the way it happened here on earth. But that assumption follows from a single data point, which makes it highly suspect.” I’m lying on the floor, staring at the paintings, and they’re strange and terrible and beautiful. “Jupiter may have a rocky core, or it may not. It may have had one that was lost long ago, due to the convection of hot metallic hydrogen.”

  She talks, and I take it for granted that she knows what she’s talking about. I don’t exactly tune her out, but I’m more interested in the paintings than the theories behind the paintings. Here are vast canyons and rivers of ammonia, methane, water vapor, helium, hydrogen, and through them sail the hypothetical floaters, living gasbags the size of cities. More than balloons, they remind me of mushrooms, and specifically the fruiting bodies of puffballs. They drift in herds a thousand kilometers across, or they drift alone, passively subsisting on whatever organic molecules come their way. Or they might be photosynthetic creatures, autotrophs converting sunlight into the nutrients they need. There are also the predatory hunters, tiny by comparison, sleek-winged things that put me in mind of manta rays and B-2 stealth bombers.

  “It’s a lazy habit,” she says, “always describing an unfamiliar object by recourse to familiar ones.”

  The herd of floaters is buoyed by updrafts above titanic storms depicted by the artist in all the shades of autumn leaves.

  “It may not be a matter of finding an earth-like planet,” she says, speaking to me the way she speaks to her students, “but of broadening our expectations of alien life.” It’s not a condescending voice, but it’s confident and wears an air of authority.

  The road isn’t asphalt, but it isn’t dirt, either. I have to ask what it’s called, this sort of paving, and she tells me it’s called tar and chip. So, the wheels whir loudly as we race along the ribbon of tar and chip below all that blue. I finally look away, turning to watch her, instead, and I wonder how much farther to Abington and the intersection with U.S. 44. It seems to me as though we should have already reached the end of Wolf’s Den Road.

  “Not much farther,” she assures me, though I catch a nervous wash of doubt across her face. I start to ask if we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere, if maybe we should go back and try again, or stop and consult the map. But I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t, except that the car is moving very fast, objects in motion tending to remain in motion, and we’ve been down this road so many times before. She knows the way, and I know the way, and the dry-stone walls are there on either side to prevent our straying from the path. We’re not wayward fairy-tale children, no matter what the name of the road might suggest. We’re in no danger of being roasted alive by witches in gingerbread houses, or being offered tainted apples, or gobbled up by a big bad wolf. We’re merely driving along a road in eastern Connecticut beneath an autumn sky.

  In the painting, the enormous floaters are almost the same color as the clouds they inhabit, grey-brown camouflage hues to hide them from the hunters. She describes how the floaters might be capable of expelling heavier gases, somehow separating helium and methane deep within those billowing anatomies, keeping only the useful, buoyant hydrogen. Hunters, she says, wouldn’t only attack the floaters for their flesh, but also for the reserves of pure, refined hydrogen stored within the conjectural bladders that keep them aloft.

  “It’s an eloquent scenario,” she says.

  “Don’t you mean elegant?”

  “Do I?” she asks.

  Late one night when I was six years old, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sound like a car backfiring. It dragged me to wakefulness again, and I lay waiting for it to be repeated. But it wasn’t, and finally I sat up and looked out the window, peering at the stars. We lived far enough out from the city that the light pollution only hid the dimmest stars, and I’d learned to recognize a number of constellations: the Big Dipper, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia and Cepheus. But the night I heard the sound like a backfire, there was an unfamiliar light in the sky, to the east, hanging low above the rustling trees. It didn’t twinkle, and so I imagined it might be a planet. It was the color of ripe cherries, and its glow grew fainter as I watched. After only half an hour or so, it had vanished entirely.

  The tires against that chip-and-tar pavement, the smothering blue overhead, and the nagging sense that we should have already reached Abington.

  “It’s called ouranophobia,” she says, not the night she showed me Adolf Schaller’s aliens, but some other night. It’s August, and we’ve gone to the beach to watch the Perseids, but the moon’s almost full, and we aren’t having much luck. We’ve spotted only seven or eight meteors in a couple of hours. This is the first time I tell to her how the sky makes me uneasy, how sometimes it makes me more than uneasy. I watch for falling stars and try to explain the anxiety I often feel at the sight of a clear sky.

  “I didn’t know there was a word for it,” I reply.

  “From the Greek,” she says. “Ouranos, meaning heaven.”

  “I’m not afraid of Heaven. I don’t even believe in Heaven,” and she tells me to stop being so literal.

  “Only in the daytime,” I tell her. “And it’s much worse in the autumn. Though, the sky above the sea never seems to bother me.”

  “That’s a lot of provisos,” she laughs. “Maybe there should be a special sub-phobia erected just for you.”

  “It’s not funny. I can get dizzy, genuinely dizzy, staring directly up at the sky.” I don’t admit to her that sometimes it’s a lot worse than just the dizziness, that sometimes it’s also a shortness of breath, nausea, sweating, a racing heart. That sometimes it’s so bad that I can hardly speak, and my hands shake, and I’m convinced that if I don’t sit down and dig my fingers into the ground or hold onto something sturdy I’ll tumble upwards.

  I’ve had dreams wherein I fall into the sky, the laws of gravity reversed or negated, and I fall away from the world, plunging through the stratosphere and mesosphere and exosphere and on and on until the earth is no larger than a baseball, a glimmering azure baseball I can eclipse with the palm of a hand.

  “So they drift,” she says, “and float, rise and fall. They skim through thunderheads of ammonium hydrosulfide and ammonia crystals. They prowl the tropopause, able to survive only within that vertical column of clouds, which is no more than fifty kilometers, top to bottom. They may be struck down, incinerated, by flashes of lightning a thousand times more powerful than any lightning flash on earth. They skirt the edges
of hurricanes larger than our planet. They die, one way or another, and tumble into the pyrolytic depths of the atmosphere.”

  “But there’s no actual evidence,” I say.

  “Not yet,” she replies, and smiles, and talks awhile about sending probes to explore what she calls the “habitable zone” of the Jovian firmament.

  I was six, and I stood at my bedroom window and watched a shining crimson star or planet I would never see again. Maybe others saw it that night; I have no idea whether they did or not. I can’t say either way.

  “Really, it’s sort of a chauvinist attitude,” she says, “thinking biogenesis and evolution can only occur in lakes and oceans and muddy, stagnant pools of water.”

  And later, on this day, I’m listening to the drone of the tires against the tar and chip, trying hard to keep my mind off the sky and the way Wolf’s Den Road seems longer than it ever has before, how it seems we’ll never find Abington and the highway. I wish I’d brought a book with me, and I’m about to reach into the backseat for the map, when she tells me to look at the sky, when she asks if I see what she sees. I don’t look right away. I don’t want to see, but she slows down and pulls over into the narrow, weedy strip between the road and the dry-stone wall. The car idles, and when I glance at her she’s shielding her eyes with her right hand, blocking out the glare of the sun, and her left index finger is pointing towards all that unbearable, suffocating blue.

  “Good fucking god,” she whispers. “Please tell me I’m not hallucinating. You see that, too, right?”

  I hesitate for a last precious handful of seconds, and then, when it would be obvious that I’m afraid to look, my eyes follow her pointing finger to the sky. And yes, I see it, too, just like I knew that I would. I tell her that it’s really there, which I imagine is no less difficult than admitting to murder or rape or to having vandalized a church or graveyard.

  “Get the camera,” she says.

  “We didn’t bring it,” I tell her. My mouth has gone dry, and I feel sick. I’m speaking so quietly I think maybe she won’t hear me. “Remember? We left it on the counter in the kitchen,” and she curses again, so I know that she’s heard me, after all.

  It hovers directly above the tar-and-chip slash of Wolf’s Den Road. In some ways, it reminds me of a wolf, even though it bears not even the faintest resemblance to a wolf. It reminds me of the emotions the word wolf can evoke in a child at her bedroom window, staring out into the night. I can’t take my eyes off it now, and she cuts the engine and shifts the car into park. I’m afraid she’s going to open the door, and I ask her not to, please. I insist we can see it just as well from where we’re sitting, that there’s no point in getting out of the car.

  Above the road, it seems to roll to one side, then right itself again. It shines dully in the sunlight, and makes me think of cherries. She’s hazarding guesses about how high up it is – a hundred feet, a hundred and twenty-five – and about its diameter and circumference. To me it looks as big as a whale.

  “And not only Jupiter,” she says, that night I see the painting for the first time. “There’s also Saturn to consider.” Then she takes down another book, a science-fiction novel by an author I’ve never heard of, and she reads a passage aloud to me:

  Birds that have never seen land, living out their entire lives aloft. Gossamer spider-kites that trapped microscopic spores. Particles of long-chain carbon molecules that form in the clouds and sift downward, toward the global ocean below.

  We sit there, alone and together, gazing breathlessly through the windshield at the abomination hovering above the road. We watch, hardly speaking, she in wonder and I in silent terror. I keep hoping that another car will come along, or a truck, and someone else will stop and watch it with us. I want to ask her to start the car again, but I don’t dare. It’s a windy day, but the same wind that disturbs the trees and the tall grass, the thickets of goldenrod and ragweed, doesn’t seem to disturb the thing above the road in the least. I tell myself maybe it’s high enough there’s no wind up there, but I know better.

  And then there’s a sound, not so unlike an automobile backfiring, and we both jump, startled out of our respective trances. I do more than jump; I cry out, and she takes her eyes off it just long enough to glare at me. She looks disappointed, I think. But it’s begun to move away, slowly and with no evident goal, drifting as a jellyfish drifts on the tide, or a derelict ship, or maybe only the way herds of floaters drift through gas-giant skies. Neither of us says anything until after it’s out of sight, and then she asks me to turn on the radio, and I do. She starts the car again, and it only takes us five minutes more to reach the end of Wolf’s Den Road.

  AND THE CLOUD THAT TOOK THE FORM

  An exposition on my ouranophobia. My fear of cloudless blue skies, of either falling upwards or being crushed by the weight of Heaven. Of being devoured. Of becoming untethered. In 2006, I coined “wide carnivorous sky,” a conscious inversion of Paul Bowles’ title, The Sheltering Sky (1949) and a very personal phrase that so perfectly describes my dread, which I’ve wrestled with since I was a small child. It was shortly thereafter – appropriated, let’s say – by two other authors who shall here remain nameless, but they know who they are. They might at least have asked. In the cold April of 2010, I visited these Connecticut backroads, and it truly was a terrible, terrible sky laid out above the bare branches, fields, and dry stone walls. See also R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me” (1986).

  The Prayer of Ninety Cats

  In this darkened theatre, the screen shines like the moon. More like the moon than this simile might imply, as the moon makes no light of her own, but instead adamantly casts off whatever the sun sends her way. The silver screen reflects the light pouring from the projector booth. And this particular screen truly is a silver screen, the real deal, not some careless metonym lazily recalling more glamorous Hollywood movie-palace days. There’s silver dust embedded in its tightly-woven silk matte, an apotropaic which might console any Slovak grandmothers in attendance, given the evening’s bill of fare. But, then again, is it not also said that the silvered-glass of mirrors offends these hungry phantoms? And isn’t the screen itself a mirror, not so very unlike the moon? The moon flashes back the sun, the screen flashes back the dazzling glow from the projector’s Xenon arc lamp. Here, then, is an irony, of sorts, as it is sometimes claimed the moroaica˘, strigoi mort, vampir, and vrykolakas, are incapable of casting reflections – apparently consuming light much as the gravity well of a black hole does. In these flickering, moving pictures, there must surely be some incongruity or paradox, beginning with Murnau’s Orlok, Browning’s titular Dracula, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s sinister Marguerite Chopin.

  Of course, pretend demons need no potent, tried-and-true charm to ward them off, no matter how much we may wish to fear them. Still, we go through the motions. We need to fear, and when summoning forth these simulacra, to convince ourselves of their authenticity, we must also have a means of dispelling them. We sit in darkness and watch the monsters, and smugly remind ourselves these are merely actors playing unsavory parts, reciting dialogue written to shock, scandalize, and unnerve. All shadows are carefully planned. That face is clever make up, and a man becoming a bat no more than a bit of trick photography accomplished with flash powder, splicing, and a lump of felt and rabbit fur dangled from piano wire. We sit in the darkness, safely reenacting and mocking and laughing at the silly, delicious fears of our ignorant forbearers. If all else fails, we leave our seats and escape to the lobby. We turn on the light. No need to invoke crucified messiahs and the Queen of Heaven, not when we have Saint Thomas Edison on our side. Though, still another irony arises (we are gathering a veritable platoon of ironies, certainly), as these same monsters were brought to you courtesy of Mr. Edison’s tinkerings and profiteering. Any truly wily sorcerer, any witch worth her weight in mandrake and foxglove, knows how very little value there is in conjuring a fearful thing if it may not then be banished at will.

  The theatre air is mu
sty and has a sickly sweet sourness to it. It swims with the rancid ghosts of popcorn butter, spilled sodas, discarded chewing gum, and half a hundred varieties of candy lost beneath velvet seats and between the carpeted aisles. Let’s say these are the top notes of our perfume. Beneath them lurk the much fainter heart notes of sweat, piss, vomit, cum, soiled diapers – all the pungent gases and fluids a human body may casually expel. Also, though smoking has been forbidden here for decades, the reek of stale cigarettes and cigars persists. Finally, now, the base notes, not to be recognized right away, but registering after half an hour or more has passed, settling in to bestow solidity and depth to this complex Eau de Parfum. In the main, it strikes the nostrils as dust, though more perceptive noses may discern dry rot, mold, and aging mortar. Considered thusly, the atmosphere of this theatre might, appropriately, echo that of a sepulcher, shut away and ripe from generations of use.

  Crossing the street, you might have noticed a title and the names of the players splashed across the gaudy marquee. After purchasing your ticket from the young man with a death’s head tattooed on the back of his left hand (he has a story, if you care to hear), you might have paused to view the relevant lobby cards or posters on display. You might have considered the concessions. These are the rituals before the rite. You might have wished you’d brought along an umbrella, because it’s beginning to look like there might be rain later. You may even go to the payphone near the restrooms, but, these days, that happens less and less, and there’s talk of having it removed.

  Your ticket is torn in half, and you find a place to sit. The lights do not go down, because they were never up. You wait, gazing nowhere in particular, thinking no especial thoughts, until that immense moth-gnawed curtain the color of pomegranates opens wide to reveal the silver screen.