Immortown

by Lily Markova

  The thing is, a newcomer is always a curiosity in Immortown, and such arrivals are one of our few entertainments. We, old-timers, can sense the stranger’s disposition, their personality and state of mind—it’s like a breath of crisp air to us, the foreign air of the outside world, whose welcome smell will be gone in no time, washed away by our downpours. Sooner or later, each newcomer becomes one of us, just as numb and lost.

  She wants to live—I can sense that. Her diagnosis, her mental disorder is a thirst for life, the sort of thirst that brings about feelings of suffocation, nosebleeds, euphoria, short circuits in the head, and the world’s darkening before the eyes. She wants to live so furiously it’s almost killing her. She must never stand still, never pause; idleness and preordination could drive her insane. I can’t think of a place less fitting for her than my town.

  And she used to know how to live, so that she didn’t have to regret never-made mistakes, regret that she hadn’t been enough, that she’d worried too much and admired the imperfection of life too little, even at times when happiness felt like something chimerical, selfish, and shameful.

  Of course, now she thinks that that gift has been taken away from her, but I can sense it’s still there, hiding, waiting. It’s probably for the best, though. If you know how to live, they might put you in jail or a mental hospital, experiment on you, and then turn you into a freak show attraction. They might shoot you down, eliminate witnesses, and mark your case “top secret.” They don’t like those who know how to live.

  Yes, there’s more life in her than she can contain. It could have been enough for two. She could have been my solution; she would have made everything so easy and clear. And for so many years, I’d been waiting for her. I was waiting for her when I was eight and for the first time, my hand reached for a green pencil of its own accord. I was waiting for her when yet another of my eternal loves expired, the cold fingers under the pillow not intertwined with mine anymore, the guilty “see you tomorrow” meaning “like hell I’ll ever come back.” I was waiting for her when my sister, in the heat of one of the deafening fights between our parents, stabbed herself in the stomach just to make them stop yelling, just to make them care. Where? Where was she when I needed someone alive by my side, when I thought I wouldn’t be able to manage without her? What kept her?

  And here she is. Now, now that I don’t want to be saved anymore, now that I want to sink to the very bottom, choke on silt and clay. I hate her fiery hair already—she’ll soon find that nobody here likes fire. She looks around, disoriented, floats past the possessedly partying drunkards, as though she were a saint stopping by the Inferno out of sheer curiosity, and then she pauses in front of a crooked painting pinned to the wall with a rusty axe. No one ever cares about this painting. And she stares at it with her sad green eyes, stares at my soul as if it were an exotic insect, and I can’t tell from the look on her face what she’s thinking.

  Listen, I just want you to get out of my bar.

  Freya

  I wander the quiet, gloomy streets of Immortown until evening. The few passersby, each of whom I ask how to get to Levengleds, ignore me, or else look at me as if I were trying to sell them an amulet against dragons.

  “Get to Levengleds, huh?” replies a teenage girl wearing a purple floppy hat. “That joke is older than I am—come up with something new already.” She’s sitting on the bench in front of a little shop named The Guillotine Can Wait, whose show window displays a mountain of various peculiar hats. “Your hair color is atrocious, by the way. Care to buy a turban? They’re handmade.”

  But most of the shops and cafés that I see on my way are closed; there are no cars, either passing or parked—not even a single bus stop around. It looks as if the town had been abandoned, as if its inhabitants had simply moved away for no reason, leaving all their belongings behind. Some of the buildings seem vaguely familiar, although I’m sure I’ve never been here before.

  Iver would have liked it here. This air of solitude and tranquility would have probably inspired him to write a soft, yearning song. But I can’t share this moment with him, and I keep on walking, alone.

  Finally, just when I’m about to accept that my only option is to go back to the cemetery, I hear a muffled vibrating noise, which grows louder and louder as I move deeper into the alley in search of its source—there it is! I stop before a two-story building with dark brick walls stained with red-brown blots. The first floor of the building is windowless, but the music and shouting inside are so thunderous the walls seem to tremble, as if the place were bursting with energy, spilling life all around it like a throat-burning drink. Its massive rounded front door is made of upright wooden staves belted with several bands of metal, which makes the door resemble a beer barrel.

  Attention!

  The bartender doesn’t offer life advice.

  Every third cocktail is poisoned.

  Ask your server for murder weapons.

  (If he’s dead drunk or just dead, don’t.)

  In the lower right corner of the poster, there is a bloody palm print mimicking a rubber-stamp mark.

  I shrug, pull open the door, and find myself in hell.

  Empty bottles, grimaces covered with drawings, and forks with pieces of something unappetizing impaled on their tines fly around me. Peering through the musty smoke, I discern the hazy form of a broad-shouldered guy dressed in a black waistcoat over a white shirt—must be a server. He takes a generous swig of whatever’s in that glass, puts it back on the tray he’s carrying, and drops the tray on the table in front of a resentful-looking customer. I look away, and something else catches my attention: An unframed painting is secured to the wall by an axe, its head dripping something black down the canvas.

  The image consists of three visible layers with varying degrees of opacity. In the first layer—the one that’s the most subdued and seems to be the farthest from the viewer—there’s a marionette. A hand in a skintight white glove holds the strings attached not only to the limbs but also the eyes and heart of the puppet. She’s smiling blissfully, reveling in her submission. In the next, brighter layer, the marionette is bent over, frowning and struggling with her bonds. The closest, most deep-colored layer depicts the puppet lying on the floor. She won, she broke away, but her legs and arms are fractured, and her heart is still hanging by a string above her. She’s free; she’s dead.

  The longer I look at her, the weirder I feel. Having remembered why I’m here, I shake myself out of this semi-trance and gaze around, searching for someone sober enough to be able to help me find my way back to Levengleds. A young man with pearl-gray hair and thick dark eyebrows is standing behind the bar and glaring at me for some reason. I hold his stare, with a strange feeling of déjà vu. “The bartender doesn’t offer life advice,” said the poster outside. Well, I guess it’s still worth a try.

  As I squeeze through to the counter, I’m trying to take my mind off how this bar is teeming with people—crowds have always made me feel as if I were suffocating, ever since I was little. The bartender still won’t tear his gray eyes away from me, even though someone is calling out to him—Kai. Does he know who I am? Does he know what I did? Why do I feel as though I knew him?

  For a few moments, we just look at each other, disbelievingly, as if we were old friends who’d lost touch years ago and now, boom, bumped into each other at a random bar. I strain to pick out the question I was going to ask him, but I’m missing it among the hundreds of new questions fluttering in my mind.

  I’m the only one to start when suddenly, the waiter jumps out at me from behind the curtain of smoke and shouts in my ear, “Ooh, look at that, now we have an actual reason to be having this party! A Second Wind for the new girl, on the house! Then again,” he adds wistfully, “everything’s on the house here, so. . .”

  He slams a bubbling, fuming shot glass down on the counter before me, spattering my coat with its contents. I turn to face him, and his serene drunken expression flattens in sobering terror. “What th
e hell, Kai? You promised you wouldn’t call her here!”

  Now the waiter is gawking at me with what seems like half pity, half fear in his eyes. He clutches his shaven head in his tattooed hands and looks around, as if searching for someone in particular.

  Forgoing any bickering with my judgement, I drink up the part of the Second Wind that didn’t end up on my clothes, hoping that the alcohol can help me understand what’s going on. No such luck. Seems as though one needs to have a lot more to drink in order to be on the same wavelength as these people.

  God, this place is so noisy. “Sometimes, the only way to silence everyone else is to pierce your own eardrums,” Mitch’s words resurface in my mind. He was always saying some crackpot things like that. I swallow, forcing down the lump in my throat. Will he ever say anything again, anything at all?

  “All right, could you guys help me?” My voice is so weak with exhaustion I’m not sure my attempts to outshout the music will have any success. “I was trying to get to Levengleds, but I think I’m lost!”

  “Look around you,” the waiter yells back, indicating all the other visitors, whose apparent determination to get themselves wasted seems almost inspired. “We’re all lost here. So, what happened to you?”

  “Remy, leave her alone—” Kai cuts in.

  “It’s okay.” I turn back to Remy the waiter. “Nothing happened. I just need to get to Levengleds. Do you know—”

  “—she’s not staying,” finishes Kai.

  Remy glowers at him. “No, you should have left her alone.” Before disappearing back into clouds of violet smoke, he calls to me over his shoulder, “I really am sorry.”

  “I didn’t call you here. You can’t be here,” repeats Kai, shaking his head as if he’s hoping I’m merely a tiresome hallucination that will fade away any moment now. “You must leave.”

  This bar has some serious customer service problems.

  “Look, if you could just tell me—”

  He clenches his fists, the silver ring on his right hand nearly digging into the top of the counter. “I said get out.”

  This whole damn town has some serious hospitality problems.

  I draw back and storm out of the bar, pushing my way through the throng. Fine, I guess I’ll just have to walk until I’m somewhere less stupid.

  The wet sidewalk reflects the beautiful streetlights and the dark roofs jutting out above. My head starts to spin, my eyes hurt, and feet stumble. I feel as though if I take just a few more steps forward, my heart will break through my ribs and shoot out of my back. Slowly, I sink to my knees in a pool of liquid light from a bird-shaped lamp.

  I shouldn’t have drunk that Second Wind; now I’m running out of the first. I’m tired. I don’t even know where I’ll go if I ever get to my car. Everything blurs again. In the distance, I can vaguely see a gaggle of teens coming out of a grocery store that seems too incongruous, too normal for this crazy town. They walk past without so much as one glance in my direction. I’m falling, falling, falling. . . . The earth was supposed to collide with the back of my head five seconds ago, but I keep falling into its depths.

  Kai

  The green-eyed girl is lying on the sidewalk, the skirts of her coat soaking in rainwater. Her pose is all sharp angles—just like the dead marionette from my painting. A few wavy strands of her hateful red hair have fallen over her high forehead and narrow nose. She has one of those elusive faces that can easily be transformed into a new, unrecognizable one. Yet to me, in the blue-and-green light of the streetlamp, her face is the most intriguing and flawless picture, which I never did manage to paint right. Now that I see her—not in one of my dreams, not when I close my eyes, but clearly in front of me—I can, at last, confine her in a frame and hang her in my living room.

  I’ve never known this feeling before: to be chasing something almost your entire life and then one day, receive an anonymous parcel tied with a fancy ribbon. I know that as soon as I open it, what I’ve been waiting for all this time will finally be in my hands. But what if the moment I have it, I’ll realize this is not how I imagined it would be? What if I don’t really need this trinket all that much? Or it doesn’t need me. Perhaps what I should do instead is put on gloves to make sure I don’t leave fingerprints on the packaging, send the parcel to a non-existent address, and begin looking for it again.

  I can sense someone whirl past—a young couple, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other. She’s still breathing, I think. What am I supposed to do with her now? She can’t be sent away in an unknown direction; in Immortown, presents are not returnable or exchangeable. I could always just go back to the bar, of course. Sooner or later, somebody will revive her and take her to the Last Shelter. I hear they have a vacancy again, but truth be told, there’s no real pressing need for more staff at that hotel: My town is not exactly a popular tourist destination.

  And so I walk away, leaving her to lie there in the rain. I couldn’t care less what happens to her next as long as she never comes to me again.

  Ten yards later, I swear out loud, turn around, and head back toward her. I’ll regret this forever.

  Freya

  The fire’s closing in on me. I’m falling all the way down the lighthouse’s stairwell, and the fire is rushing after me, huge billowing red-and-yellow clouds devouring everything in their wake, and I can only stare up into the flames and listen to their crackling as it grows louder and louder. I’m falling, falling. . .and finally I land on something soft. The fire’s gone. The red waves I’m seeing are just daylight filtering through my eyelids. Someone is crying over me. A girl.

  “I asked you! You promised you wouldn’t take the ones I like! She was my favorite! When will you stop stealing from me, stealing everything I want?” she whines in a high-pitched, almost childish voice. A gentle, pleasant scent fills my nostrils.

  “How was I supposed to know she was important to you”—I recognize Kai’s arctic tones—“when I wasn’t even sure she existed in the first place? I admit I might have portrayed her a few times. I saw a dream, and a face I liked in it, and I reproduced it. But I didn’t call her here. How many more times do I have to tell you? I didn’t call her to Immortown. Before she walked into the Drunk Dead, I hadn’t even sensed her presence in Levengleds. My bet is on Krystle.”

  “And why would Krystle want Freya? And anyway, Iver wouldn’t have let her!”

  Click—a lighter. Trying not to wince as the smell of cigarette smoke reaches me, I pretend to still be asleep, and listen in on the conversation in an avid panic. She knows my name. She said “Iver.” And “Krystle”—as in the claimed-to-be-dating-my-brother-while-standing-over-his-grave Krystle.

  “Come on, India.” And that’s the deep voice of Remy the waiter. Am I back in the Drunk Dead? No, it can’t be; this place is too quiet and well lit to be a bar. “Why get so steamed up about it? Listen, there’s nothing you can—”

  “No, you listen! That’s her, Remy! Why her? Here, look!”

  There is a rustle of paper. Remy sighs, and reads aloud in a monotonous voice:

  “Alone Among Her Own Faces

  “As we all look forward to the premiere of Richard Nylander’s controversial thriller Moth Madness starring Freya Aurore, let us find out more about the eminent director’s new darling in the exclusive interview he gave to our reporter.

  “None of Aurore’s previous films, as of today, has hit the big screen—though they have surely caught the fancy of a certain youth subculture. The eighteen-year-old star’s life is no less shrouded in mystery today, when she is on the brink of her big break, than ten years ago, when little Freya reigned supreme in the realm of obscure indie gems. Aurore still refuses to speak to journalists and never attends any official ceremonies. (Sounds like she’s a sensible thing, then.) However, thanks to Mr. Nylander, the only filmmaker she is said to be currently ready to work with—ooh, wonder why—we can get a glimpse of what the uncatchable Freya is like on set.”

  Remy begins to imitate the drawling a
nd mincing style of speaking that he apparently believes to be inherent in film directors.

  “ ‘Her acting is hypnotizing. Freya transforms completely and gives herself up to her character. There are times when, you know, it’s hard to bring her back to herself after an especially intense scene. She loves each of her roles as if they were real people, and she really worries when bad stuff is going to happen to them, always asking me to change the script so as to protect them. She’s truly amazing, though, and I’m extremely proud and lucky to be one of the few film directors she’s comfortable working with. She says she wants to be her characters—not just play, not just masquerade as them. But when chasing an image, it’s so easy to lose one’s true self. . . .’ ”

  Remy lets out a drawn-out yawn, and continues to read less and less intelligibly, skipping sections of the text:

  “Paparazzi who hunt. . . hard to recognize off set. . . her characters looking so different. . . Does Freya’s reclusive behavior result from her family’s sad past? That concert turning into a tragedy. . . the recent death of Iver Aurore. . . How does she cope. . . (blah, blah, blah) Tell us a little about your new movie, Richard. . . . ‘Moth Madness’ ”—prolonged vowels again—“ ‘is a psychogenic disorder. Those ill flutter like a moth’s wings until they die. . . . suicidal tendencies. . . Astra, Freya’s character in the film, is drawn to Alex [Mitch Aské.—Ed.] like a moth to the light that destroys it. . . I really like the symbolism we’ve achieved there—we’ll be filming our final scenes in an abandoned lighthouse, the source of saving light to which the plot is leading Astra. She believes everyone Alex cares about stands between her and him, and soon you will learn what comes of that. . . .’ ”

  Remy gives a shrill howl like a little wolf. “And what did I put myself through all that for, exactly?”