The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  If there were ever a life lived outside this cell, a before, then it has passed far beyond the hinterlands of my memory. And I do not go looking for it. I hare been always otherwise occupied. Always it seems, and so long has been my residency that I am become a standard, the old familiar beating heart of this sideshow. I have my own place on the painted canvas flaps, and men and women and children hand over their quarters and dollars and pennies for a glimpse of me, when all I ever do myself is glimpse.

  Gaze upon him, Gentlemen and Ladies, this wretch so driven by appetite and lust tint he might never linger very long at any delight, no matter how exquisite, for fear of what he might be missing elsewhere. Satisfaction, you ask? He’s never heard the word. It isn’t what he sees before him—though the beauty of it, the wonder and the horror and the glamour, might appease any one among you for all eternity—but what he may yet see, that nameless, unnamable sight which might await him. Do you begin to guess his affliction, he who stares so long and hard, but somehow never sees? Do not name it greed. That would be too gentle, love.

  With this red switch here, I cause the wheel to advance, cell by cell, frame by frame, and with this green switch here I halt that advance until I am quite ready for it to begin anew. My bare feet rest upon an hourglass filled with sand from all the deserts of the world (or so the Barker says), and so I must surely appear like some absurd reject from a Tarot deck. The grains fall one by one, at the precise instant I flip the red switch, so ingenious is the contraption. Clever men build clever toys. The Barker tells the crowd the glass holds a million million grains. You do the math, he likes to say I flip the red switch.

  And unseen machineries are set once more in motion—the spiral dance of spur gears and helical gears, cogs and shafts, rack and pinion clockworks, pulleys and ropes woven from the strongest hemp.

  And the wheel turns.

  Or I turn within the wheel. It hardly matters which.

  The wheel or the hub, rolling ahead one space, and I squint through my favourite spyglass or set of antique opera glasses, waiting with sweaty palms and trembling hands as one scene is duly replaced by another. I have no doubt but that the delicious, bright anticipation will kill me, sooner or later, the anticipation like acid scalding my veins. And the whole wheel shudders, those great iron spokes groaning beneath the weight of their burden, and there is a distinct click somewhere in the mechanism as a new cell fills the space vacated by its predecessor. I flip the green switch, and somewhere above me in lofty sawdust balconies the crowd gasps, and the calliope falls silent, and the Barker waits for my reaction to this newest vision.

  —-The girl lies at the edge of the sea. She is not a mermaid, not yet, but this very morning she has come upon the oily carcass of a tiger shark, nine feet snout to tail, stranded in the seaweed and sand and shell litter. All she has ever wanted, this girl, a strong heterocercal tail, pectoral and anal and pelvic fins to carry her down into abyssal gloom that she might finally take her place in Neptune’s lightless halls. She’s hacked away the head and jaws a few inches above the gill slits and buries it in the dunes. Then she returns to the shark and slips herself inside, wriggling unwanted legs deep into the slimy, decaying gullet of the monster fish, burying herself to the hips. And with an upholstery needle and fine silk thread she begins to stitch herself to the dead shark, sewing her own pale, insufficient flesh to its sturdy predator’s trunk. Later, she knows there will be some spark of magic, a marvelous alchemy of flesh and bone and cartilage to finish up the job, if she is strong and her will does not falter and she does not allow the pain to stay her hand. There will be a fusion, at the last, and answered prayers, and her pelagic longing alone will be enough to complete what she has begun. The sand all around her is spattered and splotched and stained with gore, and there’s no telling which blood is her own and which belonged to the tiger shark. Hungry gulls and ravens wheel impatiently overhead, and the wind whispers secrets through green tangles of beach roses. She understands that she has to work fast, though the heat of the sun and the stink is making her ill, making her weak, slowing her down. She has to work fast, because the tide is coming in, lapping at that tail that is not yet hers...

  Click.

  And the wheel turns. For me, the wheel turns, again.

  —Here now I see a dim and dingy room, unfurnished, three walls of bare concrete, and a young man kneels on the floor, or has fallen to his knees. I cannot tell which, and it does not necessarily matter. He wears nothing but a cloth blindfold, and his wrists are bound tightly behind his back. His head is bowed. Something immense squats over him, something glistening black as midnight, skin that may as well be leather or slick latex. It balances its bulk on long and jointed stilt legs. It purrs and sighs and sings the young man a breathless, toneless symphony of torture and transformation, of perdition and deliverance. I understand at once that he is not a prisoner. He is a willing supplicant, as this night-skinned thing would never come to a mere prisoner. It is a gourmand, this creature, and it does not come when called.

  “Mother,” he whispers. “Am I not purer Have you not summoned me, and have I not answered the summoning?” The thing makes a comforting, keening sound, and now I see that the young man kneels within a wide ring of some white powder.

  “I have waited so long,” he says. “I have been faithful, and never has another touched me.”

  Hearing that, the black thing stops crooning and stands there above him, swaying almost imperceptibly on those long insectile legs. I quickly adjust the fine focus on a pair of Swarovski binoculars, pushing the insufficient opera glasses aside, and now I can plainly see the huge blisters on the creature’s distended underbelly. The young man raises his head, looking up as though he can see through the blindfold and would now behold the sight of it, the sight of her. And then the blisters rupture, popping one after another, spraying him with foul corruption, the ichor of old and unimaginable infections. There is an expression of release and perfect elation on his upturned face, the face of a man standing at the gates of the only Heaven he has ever imagined.

  Something the colour of a fresh burn slips from a slit set high on the creatures body, a proboscis or appendage of similar utility, perhaps, and it slithers and winds itself about the supplicant’s torso, blindly feeling its way along the contours of his back, lingering at the base of his spine, and then sliding suddenly inside his ass. He moans and mutters obscene adjurations while the night-skinned thing fills him with its seed or eggs or something else that I cannot even begin to comprehend. I reach for the red switch.

  Click.

  And the cages roll, ferrying the scene away.

  Above me, the Barker cackles through his megaphone.

  Behold this Peeping Tom, this onlooker, starving though such a sumptuous banquet is laid out before him! Visions of such awful and exquisite ecstasy that even old Narcissus would be distracted from the reflection gazing back up at him from that still Thespian pool. But these spectacles we so thoughtfully provide are not enough, dear hearts. And why is this, might you inquire, being as you are of inquisitorial and meddlesome dispositions? Well, alas, I can only conjecture. But one must begin to suspect a certain peculiar emptiness in him, a hole or cavity, some spiritual cavern of such profound dimensions that it may never be filled up. He can not see enough. In all the wide universe, there are not sights sufficient to his unending need. Pity him, friends. And see...

  The wheels turn, and I work the nearest hand crank, trading in one set of binoculars for a different pair. Below my feet, a single grain of sand falls, a single grain plucked from the Sahara or the Kalahari, the Karakum or Australia’s Western Desert.

  I do not feel their eyes on me.

  I do not hear his booming voice.

  —The stockade, a muddy pen enclosed by rough wooden posts and rails and a rusty metal gate held loosely shut with a twisted length of barbed wire. Mud the colour of shit, and the swineherd stands there in his tall rubber boots, a leather whip clenched in one fist. There are two or three oth
ers sitting on the rails, watching and shod with muddy rubbers of their own. In the pen, there are seven... animals... down on hands and knees, rooting about in the mud and filth. They might have been men and women once, long ago. There are still vestiges of that former humanity in evidence, of the lives lived and lost. They still have faces. Otherwise, there would be no reason to watch. This is the uttermost debasement of humanity, perhaps. I hold that thought a moment, and then push it aside. No, this must be only the beginning, and disgrace and humiliation beyond my stunted ability to apprehend still awaits.

  The swineherd curses and strikes one of the animals—which I know was once a very beautiful woman—lashing it across the buttocks with his whip. It squeals in pain and anger, and there might almost be the ruin of words in there somewhere, as well. It rises up on hind legs amputated neatly below the knees, kicking out at the man with forelegs amputated just as neatly below the elbows. It snarls at the swineherd, bearing incisors and the short tusks protruding from is malformed lips. It has six flaccid breasts, and I wonder how many litters of piglets and not-quite-piglets have pawed and suckled at those teats.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” one of the men sitting on the fence calls out to the swineherd. “That’s the sow bitch bit me, right there.”

  The swineherd grins and hits the beast again, harder than before. “Is that it, piggy? You like to bite? You gone and got a taste for blood?”

  She grunts and falls clumsily back into the mud, but only a moment later, two of the men from the fence have jumped down and seized hold of her short rear legs, and together they drag her towards the rusty gate. The swineherd is opening it, unknotting the barbed wire, and the gate creaks loud on corroded hinges. I know what’s coming next, and I could linger here. I could see it through. The jute cords cinched quick around her stubby back legs before they strain and hoist her to hang head down above a galvanized aluminum washtub. Metal stained and scabbed from all the butcheries that have come before, and I could watch while she dangles there and squeals and screams like the woman she used to be, until the swineherd draws his blade across her throat—

  I flip the red switch again.

  The contraption bears the scene away, and I turn to the eyepiece of a spyglass I’ve been told was found amongst the effects of a certain Caribbean pirate. But that’s one of the Barker’s tales, so this instrument might have come from anywhere, anywhere at all.

  Another grain of sand.

  With thumb and index finger, I flip the green switch.

  —And now there is a garden before me, a pretend rainforest dripping beneath wrought iron and greenhouse glass, stolen and patched back together from bits of Amazonia and the Congo and the jungles of Indonesia. There are long tables and workbenches, spades and empty terra-cotta pots and bulging bags of topsoil and fertilizer. Steam rises from thick clumps of philodendrons and scouring rushes and a hundred varieties of plants I do not know names for. The fleshy, drooping blossoms of the most exotic orchids, the sticky lures of bizarre carnivorous dicots, and here and there are primordial cycads and the trunks of tree ferns imported from New Zealand. For all I know, time may have begun here, in this garden, and I would not be surprised to see gigantic lizards watching from magnolia limbs or to hear the heavy air shattered by the shrieks of pterodactyls. There are two women—one older, the other somewhat younger, but both uncommonly handsome. The older woman’s hair has begun to fade from black to grey, and her companion’s hair is a shade that reminds me of crushed pecan shells.

  They’re sitting together on one of the benches. Neither is dressed, and their skin seems almost to glow in the warm sunlight sifting down through the arboretum glass. A fountain gurgles somewhere nearby, splashing droplets of fresh, clean water on the dark slate flagstones that pave the garden path. Between the two women there is a small parcel resting on the bench, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with twine. Something they have waited many years to receive, no doubt, some botanical rarity to at last complete their nursery, and the older woman snips the twine with a pair of shears.

  “You are sure?” she asks her companion.

  “Yes,” the younger woman replies—too eagerly, too truthfully—and smiles, and then they kiss, there beneath those antediluvian fronds and epiphytic canopies. It is a long and hard and somehow desperate kiss, drawing from deep passion that might well be as ancient as all the forests of the world. There is tenderness here, and devotion, and love I cannot fathom, and I reach for the red switch.

  But I have not yet seen the contents of the parcel.

  And so my hand hovers, indecisive, above the control panel. Far above, the Barker chuckles and his audience holds its collective breath.

  “You have to be sure,” the older woman says, and this time her lover merely nods for a reply and opens the parcel. Just a simple cardboard box beneath the paper, but she reaches inside and produces a glass vial, corked and filled with an emerald liquid that sparkles in the sun. And there is a small manila envelope, as well, and she opens it and shakes out a number of pea-sized seeds into the older woman’s outstretched palm. The very last thing from the box is something wrapped in cellophane, which she unwraps, and I see it’s a small wad of clayey black earth.

  I touch the switch, quickly losing interest, and I can feel the Barker, urging me on, taunting me with no words at all, only the steely glint of those eyes I have never seen and never shall see.

  The younger woman is lying naked on the damp flagstones now, her legs spread wide to reveal the hidden cleft of her sex, and the older woman bends down over her. In her right hand, she holds the seeds, and in her left, the glass vial, which she has unstoppered. She whispers a few lines of poetry which I can clearly hear, passages in dactylic hexameter that might be Ovid’s Metamorphoses and might be something else altogether. And now her lover closes her eyes and lies very still while the older woman empties the contents of the green vial into her companion’s vagina. Next, most of the seeds are carefully placed within warm labial and cervical folds; the last two are tucked in snugly beneath the clitoral hood.

  From my seat at the hub and through my lenses I can see it all, the finest details of that secret anatomy, the busy planting fingers, the expression on the older woman’s face that might almost be sorrow and regret and whatever comes before the fact of a loss. I can see it all. For the moment, I have forgotten the red switch and what it signifies. I have forgotten, too, the Barker and his crowd and the dazzling spotlight halo.

  The older woman kneads black clay between her callused fingers, then uses it to seal her lover shut.

  “How long?” the younger woman asks, opening her eyes and staring up into tropical boughs and sunlight and the intricate framework of glass and steel.

  “Soon now,” the older woman replies, sitting down on the stones beside her. But I can see that it has already started, this metamorphosis; the younger woman’s pubic hair has become a mossy thatch, and the yellow-green shoot that was so recently only her clit is pushing its way up through the clay plug.

  I flip the red switch.

  The Barker roars like a typhoon of fire and freezing wind, and another grain of sand falls beneath my feet.

  Click.

  Too much sentiment? the Barker howls, a question tumbling from the storm overhead, and then another on its heels. Too much inconvenient feeling getting in the way, when all he wants is raw, insensate exhibition? Look ye upon this poor, poor fellow. How he rushes ahead, pell-mell. How he grinds his teeth and anticipates and grows dizzy from his endless, irresolvable erection. Will he burst ere much longer, or are his balls, so long denied, gone dry and shriveled as the mummified testicles of an Egyptian pharaoh?

  I flip the green switch.

  —A boy stands before a tall looking glass, but for a moment I am too distracted by my own reflection there to notice anything else, just my face staring back at me through the pirates’ telescope. So I reach for one of the cranks and quickly switch again to binoculars and a different angle, a different perspective. And yes, a bo
y standing before a looking glass—he cannot yet be twenty, maybe nineteen. His dick is hard, and he holds it firmly in his right hand. He has shaved his legs and wears black stiletto pumps and black silk stockings held up with a matching lace garter belt. His belly is flat and hard, but not so muscular that it spoils the illusion. He’s spent almost a whole hour on his face and imagines his own scarlet lips closing tightly around the shaft of his swollen penis. He has never once seen any girl even half so lovely as himself, and never has he desired any man, either. He has made love to both, of course, but always those couplings have left him disappointed and confused. He is often haunted by phone calls and letters from discarded paramours, the ones who want more and cannot understand his disinterest.

  If only I had a twin, he has frequently thought. If only I had an identical twin, we would never have need of mother. Indeed, there have been times when he entertained fantasies of twins born and lost, born and hidden, born and then taken from him at birth. And one day they might meet by some unlikely happenstance. Someday, he might glance across a bustling street or the dining room of a crowded restaurant and see his own green eyes gazing back at him.