The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  On your knees before the altar of the moon, which on this night is all the world. And I have your key on a chain about my neck. Even if you would not let me close those black steel cuffs tight about your wrists tonight, I carry the key always. I lie still, breathing as quietly as I may, and you turn your head and stare down at me with the eyes she has given you, your mother or the moon or the both of them conspiring. Those iridescent, night-seeing eyes, and for a moment I think this will finally be the night you do not love me enough. And for a moment, I wish that were the truth.

  But then you turn away, and I hear, or only imagine that I hear, the staccato dick of sharp claws against the wooden floors, and I’m alone again. I’m waiting again, and I do not care if the moon sees the malice and the anger on my face. I will not hide my resentment for her, and I will not hide my loathing of that grim celestial whore. I will lie here, still and listening closely to the night beyond these thin walls, listening for you, my love. And I will track her progress across the wide indigo sky, and when it is time and there is some hint of dawn, I will get up and dress and draw a hot bath so that you will not have to wait when you’ve come home to me again.

  Ah, pray make no mistake,

  We are not shy;

  We’re very wide awake,

  The moon and I...

  The Hole with a

  Girl in Its Heart

  Here,” she said and pointed to a spot just below her sternum, below the cartilaginous tab of her xiphoid process. “It is here. When I swallowed it, this is where it settled. This is where it is.”

  There is never any sense that I am falling.

  I open my eyes and watch that tortured patch of space, the blue star feeding the blazing accretion disk and the long pale axis of the relativistic jet geysering its stream of electrons and protons and more exotic particles away from the black hole, that stream traveling very near the speed of light.

  I have come so far to fall, and now there is no sense at all that I am falling.

  In her trailer, she sat alone, for never had she been anything but alone. Not since the night she’d wandered out among the dunes and found whatever it was lying in the sand and had taken it into herself. I now say whatever it was, for she would not ever name it herself. But she had placed it upon her tongue, that supermassive lozenge, and allowed it to move down her throat and the corridor of her esophagus, until it found that place where it had seemed most suited.

  That is her story. The story she told me.

  That is what I recall of her story.

  “I was walking in the dunes, and then down onto the shore. At first, I thought it was only some glowing creature left stranded by the tide. I could not say how far it had journeyed to reach me.”

  She makes these assumptions—it had journeyed to reach me—and I let her, for she is the one who holds it in her chest, not I. She is the vessel, and never was I anything more than a supplicant Five years, and I finally tracked her down a few miles outside Lincoln, Nebraska, living in an old Airstream travel trailer parked out behind a carnival sideshow tent. She’d been with the outfit—part thrill-ride sidestall midway, part Pentecostal revival—for almost six months. I never did learn where she’d been before that. I think they thought that I had come to take her away with me, away from them—the freaks and the swagmen, the roustabouts and the wildeyed young woman who spent her nights speaking in tongues and leading lost lambs back to the loving arms of Jesus. I had not. It would not have mattered if I had, for there is no will in all the world that can overcome the gravity of her.

  “They are all very sweet,” she said, meaning the carnival people. “They are all lost.”

  “Even the preacher lady?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Her most especially. She is the most lost of them all, poor thing. Sometimes, she comes to talk with me late at night when she thinks no one will know. She sees angels watching her from telephone poles and has terrible dreams about the end of the world.”

  I sat on the orange sofa crammed into one end of the Airstream trailer and sipped from the plastic tumbler of warm, flat root beer she’d given me. She talks, and I listen. There is a low shelf crammed with books, and I read the spines while she tells me about the day the show found her, starving and broke and hitchhiking her way across Nevada. Most of the books are hardbacks, almost all of them over my head—The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time; Principles of Physical Cosmology; Quantum Mechanics and Experience’, The Meaning of Quantum Theory.; The Conscious Universe; Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. And there among all those weighty, intimidating volumes was one familiar face, a battered paperback copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Tine.

  “Now they think they could not survive without me. They could, of course, just as they survived before I came.” The warm root beer was beginning to taste like Pepto-Bismol, and I sat the tumbler on a folding metal table.

  “Put your hand right here,” she said, smiling, only that was later, days or hours later. “Can you feel it?”

  There is no sense at all that I am falling.

  It is not at all what I expected. She promised me that it wouldn’t be. I want to shut my eyes again, but it would not matter. I have seen it now, and shutting my eyes will not ever drive away the memory. I do not want to drive the memory away, but it is so much to have seen. It is so much to know.

  I pressed my fingers to her chest.

  “They come, like you,” she said. “They hear that the show’s rolled into town, and they come just to see, some of them. Or a man might come because all his life he’s felt so empty, all his life he’s felt there’s this terrible knot of emptiness trapped in his belly or behind his eyes. Women have come because they’ve had a baby and felt empty ever since, or because they’ve never been able to conceive. Sometimes, they’ve come because even though they’ve never desired a child, there’s still this vacant place deep inside. But they all come because, one way or another, they feel a terrible emptiness.” The late afternoon sun through the tiny windows of the Airstream was very hot and very bright, and her skin was clammy and slick with sweat.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked me, and I could hear excitement in her voice, excitement and a gentle, unselfish sort of pride. “It knows you. It has known you all along.”

  But, for all my desire, for all my need, for all my emptiness, all I could feel was her sweat and the tiny, invisible hairs growing there below her small breasts.

  “They come,” she said again. “They come from all over. And they all have their different stories to tell. No two ever just exactly alike, same as with snowflakes and fingerprints. But they all have that one thing in common, because, you know, all snowflakes are snow-flakes and all fingerprints are fingerprints.”

  I didn’t tell her why I’d come. My own sob story. The reason for the knot of emptiness chewing me up inside. I never could have told her that, and, mercifully, she didn’t ask, and I thought perhaps she was relieved that I’d kept it to myself.

  “It’s a myth,” she said, “that black holes just sit out there gobbling up everything that comes too close. The gravitational field in the proximity of a black hole is no different than the gravitational field produced by any symmetric sphere of the same mass. Objects in space may orbit out beyond the edges of the extent horizon indefinitely.”

  “You have to cross the event horizon,” I said, and that made her smile again.

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “I’ve read a little bit, but nothing like you,” and I nodded towards the bookshelf by the orange sofa, all those intimidating hardbacks and A Wrinkle in Time. “Just some of the popular stuff. Stephen Hawking, Clifford Pickover, you know. Books for the lay readers.”

  “Have you ever read Kitty Ferguson?” she asked, and I said no, that I hadn’t, that I’d not even heard of her before. And there we sat together, in the hot sunlight, talking about books, my hand still pressed to that spot below her xiphoid process.

  “Ah, well,” she said. “No matter. It sounds l
ike you read enough. Much more than most.”

  And then I felt it move.

  I know the name of this star. I even saw a painting once, an artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 system as a blue supergiant orbiting a black hole. It was a very pretty painting, but it cannot ever compare to what I see, squinting through the forward porthole—the writhing flood of superheated matter flowing out from the young star across however many millions of miles of space to form the black hole’s fiery accretion disk. Eight thousand light-years from Earth, and yet only an hour ago, and hour and a half at most, I was sitting with her in the sweltering aluminum trailer behind the freak tents, sitting there in the stark yellow-white light of a different star.

  “For most all of them,” she said, “it is enough just to touch.”

  If there had been any sort of a scar, I would have thought it no more than a hoax, that maybe it was nothing but a marble or a ball bearing or possibly some sort of body-piercing implant hidden there beneath her flesh. My fingers began to tingle very faintly, and she took a deep breath and shut her eyes.

  “It is not really a hole at all,” she said.

  And I have no sense that I am falling.

  “It’s not enough for me,” I told her. “I wish to god it were, but it’s not. I think I must have been looking for you my whole goddamned life.”

  And I think that’s when I saw her clearly for the first time. When I saw her, instead of merely seeing some object of my desperation, the fruition of my search, the bizarre and garish images painted ten-feet high on the flapping canvas front of the freak show. She was sitting there on a wooden stool, her T-shirt hiked up so I could touch her bare chest, no bra, her nipples brown, each surrounded by a small constellation of freckles. Her hair was the color of hay, her face thin but not severe, her eyes almost the same shade of blue as the star looming outside the porthole. Plain, no one I ever would have thought to call her pretty, and yet I had never seen any woman even half so beautiful. There were freckles below her eyes, speckling her cheekbones. Her lips were thin and chapped.

  “It’s not enough for me,” I said again, because she hadn’t replied, and I was beginning to think she hadn’t heard me. The smile faded, and she glanced towards the trailer door.

  “It’s strictly a one-way trip,” she said. “The mechanism, it doesn’t swing both ways.”

  “There’s nothing at all holding me here,” I told her, wondering briefly if that were true, if I could fairly claim to be that entirely alone, if I had managed somehow to live almost forty goddamn years without picking up so much as a single string tying me to anything or any place or anyone else.

  “I can’t bring you back,” she said, as though trying to make herself more clearly understood.

  “But I wouldn’t be the first?”

  “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t. But I wish—”

  “—it was enough for me to see it, to place my hands upon it?” She looked at me again and nodded her head. Beneath my fingertips, something small and hard rolled inside her.

  “Will it hurt you?” I asked her.

  “No. It has never yet hurt me. It has filled me up with the debris of a thousand worlds, the secrets of galaxies, but it has never hurt me.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Someplace else,” she answered and smiled again, but this time I could tell it was forced. I think I was glad that’s the only answer she had for me, because I’d half expected mad ramblings about gifts from God Almighty and benevolent aliens and the lost continent of Atlantis.

  “I can’t guarantee it’s what you’re after,” she said, looking down at my fingertips pressed to her chest.

  “I would never ask you to. No one ever gets a guarantee. Leastways, that’s always been my experience.”

  “There are days,” she said, then paused and swallowed. “There are nights I wish I’d never found it. It’s a burden I’d never want to lose it, not really, but I’d be lying if I said it isn’t a burden.”

  I pulled my hand away then, because there was an unexpected rush of self-doubt and second thoughts, and the tingling in my fingers was becoming almost painful, spreading across my palm and encircling my wrist. I turned my head, looking directly into the brilliant glare of the setting sun shining in through parted drapes, and though I could not see them, I could sense them—the carny folk, waiting anxiously out there in the oatmeal patch of grass and weeds between the freak tent and the silver aluminum Airstream.

  “They’re so frightened that your coming here means I’m leaving them,” she said.

  I turned back to her, blinking at a dazzling swarm of yellow afterimages.

  “I’m ready,” I told her.

  “I’m ready,” I whisper, staring out through the starship’s porthole, wishing she were here to see. Bat that was one of the stipulations, she said. One of the rules. She could serve as a conduit for countless others, but she could never travel this road herself.

  Only an hour and a half ago, or maybe its been eight thousand years—and at this point I cannot see the difference—she took my tingling left hand and placed firmly against her chest. I could feel the hard, rotating object inside her, and I could feel her heartbeat.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. “Close your eyes now and then count to ten very slowly. Don’t you dare open your eyes until you get to ten. Promise me that you won’t.”

  “Like Orpheus,” I suggested. “Don’t dare look back.”

  “I’m not joking. Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” I told her.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  The blue light falls across the black metallic substance that forms the deck beneath me and washes warmly across my face. It fills my eyes, and I lean forward, craning my neck for a better view of Cygnus X-1, dark twin slowly consuming light twin in that great cosmic waltz.

  She opened herself, and I’d already started counting.

  The air smelled of burning leaves and dust. There was, as now, no sense whatsoever of falling.

  And the terrible yawning emptiness inside me is gone, banished in the simple count from one to ten. This blue light fills me full, and I cannot now even imagine having once felt so hollow. I do finally shut my eyes, and I only imagine that I can hear heavy canvas flapping in a hot Nebraska summer wind, and that I can also hear her opening the door to the Airstream travel trailer and stepping down to stand among them. I only imagine their relief, and I only pretend she knows how grateful I am.

  Outside the Gates of Eden

  So easily do we lose track of time here, as easily as drawing my next breath, and sometimes with far less effort. Time is not quite absent, no, but neither does it press in at me with the old, persistent urgency. I lie here only half awake, but also only half asleep, dreaming but free of the subconscious’ weight and nagging symbolism. The bed sheets smell like old roses, sweat, nectar, cardamom, rye whiskey, semen—all those bittersweet tinctures of you and me and the strangling moments that have passed between us. This will not ever be as simple as fucking, and I still haven’t quite gotten used to that. Like when you say to me that it’s not lycanthropy and not vampirism or schizophrenia or merely some glamour you’ve called up from the terrible old books you keep locked away behind glass. What it is, I will not say. It is not for me to say, to put my finger on, and I’d likely get it wrong, anyway. I roll over, and you’re here on hands and knees, watching me, and your eyes flash red-green iridescence in the candlelight. “Come here, boy,” you smile, and always I have to remind myself it’s not a mask, for there can be no masks here. No deceptions, but only the merciless, perpetual peeling away of deceit and all manner of disguisement. “Come here, boy,” and you slip your fingers between my legs, encircling my cock, winning from me a small gasp and a scrap of laughter. At first, I was surprised to hear laughter in this place, but now it seems as natural as the ubiquitous undercurrents of freshly turned earth and carrion and hothouse flowers that scent the air.

  “Maybe I was busy,” I
say, feigning annoyance. “Maybe: I was otherwise occupied.”

  “And maybe I’ve finally grown tired of the taste of your prick,” you say, still smiling, still flashing those hyena teeth, nutcracker teeth to split open living bone, and your purplish tongue lolls from your black lips.

  “Puppy,” I playfully whisper, trying very hard not to laugh, and you growl and pull faces and show me much worse things than hyena incisors and canines and grinding carnassials. Your grip on my penis tightens, and I wonder how much it’s going to hurt this time. But it’s a distant sort of wondering, because I have not been afraid of pain for what must be years or months, at least. If it has only been weeks, I would be appalled. I have not been appalled in so long I cannot now quite recollect the sensation.

  In your hand, captured in the circlet of your clawed thumb and index finger, my cock writhes, become now the roughest imitation of a serpent.

  “You haven’t been practicing,” you frown, though of course I have. I have been practicing quite a lot, actually, but the trick does not come so readily to me. My flesh is too set in its ways, uncooperative hidebound me, and I am grateful you can see all this in my eyes without my having to speak the words aloud. You see my shame, as well, and you see how badly I want to impress.

  “Well, it’s better than last time,” you lie, and let those reticulated coils of bronze and sepia and ginger wrap firmly around your wrist. I think about biting—no venom, just teeth as sharp and fine as sewing needles—and then decide that you might not be in the mood.

  “It is not either,” I reply. “It is not the least bit better. It wouldn’t fool anyone.”

  “Be patient, boy,” you tell me. “There’s a lot still to forget, and forgetting isn’t ever half so simple as most people seem to think.” But already I’m taking it back, the malformed constrictor gone limp and withering, slipping from your hand and vanishing into the damp vaginal folds that have formed between my thighs. That’s one I mastered almost right away, and the transformation pleased you then, but now you snarl and seal me shut with only a thought or a careless glimmer of those scavenger eyes.