The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  The Collector blushes and peers down at his hands, folded there in front of him on the desk. He begins to speak and stammers, as if, possibly, he’s really no better with words than she.

  “What do you know about my sister?” Ellen asks again. “How do you know about her?”

  The Collector frowns and licks nervously at his chapped lips. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That was terribly tactless of me. I should not have brought it up.”

  “How do you know about my sister?”

  “It’s not exactly a secret, is it?” the Collector asks, letting his eyes drift by slow, calculated degrees from his hands and the desktop to her face. “I do read the newspapers. I don’t usually watch television, but I imagine it was there, as well. She was murdered—”

  “They don’t knew that. No one knows that for sure. She is missing,” the violinist says, hissing the last word between clenched teeth.

  “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, a malformed parody, 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 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 towards her across the desk. “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 fora French painter, Albert Ferrault, 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 memoir,” 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 back 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—Gorecki, maybe, or Phillip 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 opens the top middle drawer of his desk and takes out the revolve
r 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 felt before this night. The strange 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 is listen.

  She shuts her eyes, no longer needing them to grasp the progression from one note to the next, and at first there is only the comfortable darkness there behind tier 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 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 she 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 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 has become hers and hers alone.

  The Lovesong of

  Lady Ratteanrufer

  1.

  In the stories she tells herself late at night, there were rats even before the world began. There were fat, hungry rats that waited huddled together in the void, the endless nowhere place where there were not yet stars or planets or gods or angels, but only the nothingness before creation and only the rats. Lying on her dirty mattress on long summer nights when it’s too hot to sleep, or longer winter nights when it’s too cold to do anything much but shiver, she’s watched the blue-black sky draped low above the city and whispered to herself, and to anything else that might be listening, how the rats finally grew bored and tired of always being hungry, and so from their droppings they made the heavens and all the worlds that have ever been. They chewed tiny holes in the darkness to let in starlight, and then they pissed out all the rivers and oceans and the bright spatter of the Milky Way so that they wouldn’t have to go on being thirsty any longer. In her story, the rats made men and women, too, and every other sort of animal and plant. Like all her stories, it’s a secret. Like her coins and the eyeless doll and the pennywhistle she found one day in a weedy cemetery near the river. Dull and dented brass with six holes punched out along its length, a black plastic fipple for her thin lips, and a garish bit of scarlet dabbed partway down the tube, but most of the paint was already scratched away when she found it. In her secret story, the first rats made themselves a brass pennywhistle, dabbed with red paint, and when they played it, their droppings became the universe. She keeps the whistle wrapped up in a swatch of denim, tucked into a wooden box hidden beneath a loose floorboard. She can’t remember where exactly, or when exactly, she found the wooden box, but for a while it played pretty music whenever she opened its lid. Then she dropped it one day, bump to the floor, and now she only gets music from the pennywhistle she keeps inside the wooden box. In her story, this is the very same pennywhistle the rats played to make the stars and planets and moons and animals from the primordial void. And it has fallen upon her to keep it safe until the day when they need it again, because, in her story, the tats will need their whistle again, when history is finally over and they’ve grown bored with all the things they made to gnaw and keep their bellies full and the time has come to unmake the world. But, until then, they don’t mind that she plays it. That’s why the rats left it there in the cemetery among the moss and dandelions, the broken headstones and toadstools, that she would find it one day and teach herself songs that no one else had ever heard before because in learning how to play them she also created them. That is the peculiar magic of this pennywhistle, that it blithely weaves creation in rolls and slides and vibrato embellishments, in the practiced dance of fingertips and the press of lips and tongue and the living breath that spills in through its mouthpiece and out the other end. But she also knows that it must be a deadly, perilous thing, for death is the shadow of creation, and to court me is always to
invite its familiar. There are other things in the wooden box with the pennywhistle and the swatch of denim: a striped sock filled with the coins she’s found, scraps of paper printed with words that she mostly can’t read, a green marble, rocks, buttons, a die, a piece of white lace, rubber bands, spools of thread, the discarded husks of bugs and wasps and cicadas, three odd wooden tiles with the letters A, Y, and T on them, the feathers of blue jays and mockingbirds, a tiny ceramic animal that looks sort of like a white dog but isn’t, and an old pair of spectacles she sometimes wears when she’s in a rut and wants to see things differently. But she knows that of all these treasures, only the pennywhistle really matters. Only the pennywhistle must be kept safe. Rats have almost no use at all for rubber bands and spools of thread. In the story, the rats have a word for music, and it’s the same word they use for yesterday and today and tomorrow, and the same word that means now, too.

  2.

  She lives in a mostly empty redbrick building not far from the river, because looking out a window and seeing the wide gray-green river winding past usually makes her feel safe whenever she’s frightened and can’t think of a story to tell herself. Hardly anyone else lives in the building, as it’s very damp so close to the water, and the air often stinks of mold and mud and dead fish and the oily rainbow sheen that floats along on top of the river. There’s tall grass and crooked trees and all sorts of briars and bushes growing around the redbrick building, and she likes to think these things were planted to conceal her from the street and curious eyes and any people who might be passing by, the people who usually keep to the city and hardly ever come down to the river. But sometimes they do come, to stand out there on the bridge that spans the river and drop things into the water, or shoot their guns at the sky, or get drunk and fight among themselves. In one of her stories, the people from the city worship an enormous snake that lives at the bottom of the river below the bridge, and the things she’s seen them dropping into the water are offerings to the snake god. Long ago, after the rats made the world, but ages before she was born, the snake slithered up out of the oily river and vomited fire and lightning bolts, burning the city and killing almost everyone but these crazy men with their guns and liquor and their scabby lists. The fire seared their minds and boiled their eyes and made them insane—the few it didn’t simply kill—but not so blind or crazy that they didn’t understand that now they had to keep the snake content unless they wanted it rising from the river to spit fire at them all over again. The rats and the snake are ancient, mortal enemies. Maybe the rats made the whole universe, but they didn’t make the snake or all the countless wriggling children of the snake. The snake came here from somewhere else. Some other universe, perhaps, some place else where it wasn’t welcome, and there’s a story she tells herself where the brave rats fought the snake after it had burned down all the cities in the world. The rats drove the snake back down into the murky water beneath the bridge, and it has stayed there ever since, because the crazy men bring it offerings of whiskey and wine, and sing it gunpowder songs and hurt one another, bleeding to keep it happy and to keep it asleep. But today there are no men on the bridge, and she can sit alone in her room and play the magic pennywhistle for the rats who live in the walls of the redbrick building. Sometimes, they even come peeping out of the holes in the plaster and sit very still, listening to the music she makes for them. Not today, but sometimes they do. They come to hear her songs and to see that they’ve not made a mistake trusting her to keep the pennywhistle safe. If the snake were ever to get it, they’ve told her time and again, he would immediately begin to play the secret backwards song that would undo the universe, and only the rats can say when it’s time for all things to end. She plays them pretty songs and sad songs and songs that don’t mean much of anything at all, songs that are only music. Once, oil a night when the moon was full and tinted an angry yellow and staring threatfully in through her window, the rats came to her, a hundred or two hundred of them all at once. They sat and listened while she played a story about looking for crayfish and mussels along the banks of the river, about picking blackberries and pricking her fingers on the thorns. When she was done, they made small and approving rat noises, and a few even came right up to the edge of her mattress so she could stroke their fur with her fingers, the same fingers that drew stories out of the magical pennywhistle. And from that night on, she understood that the rats all watched over her and kept her safe from the moon and the fire-breathing snake sleeping beneath the bridge and from all the drunken, crazy men, just as she kept their whistle hidden safely inside her mute wooden box beneath the loose floorboard.