The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  I sit on my stool, and you kneel there on the stone floor, waiting for me to be done, restlessly awaiting my passage and the moment when I have been rendered incapable of repeating familiar tales you do not wish to hear retold.

  “I held him, what remained of him. I felt the shudder when his child’s soul pulled loose from its prison. His blue eyes were as bright in that instant as the glare of sunlight off freshly fallen snow. As for the man who drove the cart, he committed suicide some weeks later, though I did not learn this until I was almost grown.”

  “There is no ox cart here,” you whisper. “There are no careless hooves, and no innocent drover.”

  “I did not say he was a drover. I have never said that. He was merely a farmer, I think, on his way to market with a load of potatoes and cabbages. My brother’s entire unlived life traded for a only few bushels of potatoes and cabbages. That must be esteemed a bargain, by any measure.”

  “We should begin now,” you say, and I don’t disagree, for my legs are growing stiff and an indefinable weight has begun to press in upon me. I was warned of these symptoms, and so there is not surprise, only the fear that I have prayed I would be strong enough to bear. You stand and help me to my feet, then lead me the short distance to the vivarium tank. Suddenly, I cannot escape the fanciful and disagreeable impression that your mechanical apparatuses and contraptions are watching on. Maybe, I think, they have been watching all along. Perhaps, they were my jurors, an impassionate, unbiased tribunal of brass and steel and porcelain, and now they gaze out with automaton eyes and exhale steam and oily vapours to see their sentence served. You told me there would be madness, that the toxin would act upon my mind as well as my body, but in my madness I have forgotten the warning.

  “Please, I would not have them see me, not like this,” I tell you, but already we have reached the great tank that will only serve as my carriage for these brief and extraordinary travels—if your calculations and theories are proved correct—or that will become my deathbed, if, perchance, you have made some critical error. There is a step ladder, and you guide me, and so I endeavor not to feel their enthusiastic, damp-palmed scrutiny. I sit down on the platform at the top of the ladder and let my feet dangle into the warm liquid, both my feet and then my legs up to the knees. It is not an objectionable sensation, and promises that I will not be cold for much longer. Streams of bubbles rise slowly from vents set into the rear wall of the tank, stirring and oxygenating this translucent primal soup of viscous humours, your painstaking brew of proteine and hæmatoglobin, carbamide resin and cellulose, water and phlegm and bile. All those substances believed fundamental to life, a recipe gleaned from out dusty volumes of Medieval alchemy and metaphysics, but also from your own researches and the work of more modern scientific practitioners and professors of chemistry and anatomy. Previously, I have found the odor all but unbearable, though now there seems to be no detectable scent at all.

  “Believe me,” you say, “I will have you back with mein less than an hour.” And I try hard then to remember how long an hour is, but the poison leeches away even the memory of time. With hands as gentle as a midwife’s, you help me from the platform and into my strange bath, and you keep my head above the surface until the last convulsions have come and gone and I am made no more than any cadaver.

  “Wake up,” she says—you say—but the shock of the mercury and iodine you administered to the vivarium have rapidly faded, and once more there is but the absolute and inviolable present moment, so impervious and sacrosanct that I can not even imagine conscious action, which would require the concept of an apprehension of some future, that time is somehow more than this static aqueous matrix surrounding and defining me.

  “Do you hear me? Can you not even hear me?”

  All at once, and with a certitude almost agonizing in its omneity, I am aware that I am being watched. No, that is not right. That is not precisely the way of it. All at once, I know that I am being watched by eyes which have not heretofore beheld me; all along there have been here yes, as well as the stalked eyes of the scuttling crabs I mentioned and other such creeping, slithering inhabitants of my mind’s ocean as have glommed the dim pageant of my voyage. But these eyes, and this spectator—my love, nothing has ever seen me with such complete and merciless understanding. And now the act of seeing has ceased to be a passive action, as the act of being seen has stopped being an activity that neither diminishes nor alters the observed. I would scream, but dead women do not seem to be permitted that luxury, and the scream of my soul is as silent as the moon. And in another place and in another time where fast and future still hold meaning, you plunge your arms into the tank, hauling me up from the shallow deep and moving me not one whit. I am fixed by these eyes, like a butterfly pinned after the killing jar.

  It does not speak to me, for there can be no need of speech when vision is so thorough and so incapable of misreckoning. Plagues need not speak, nor floods, nor the voracious winds of tropical hurricanes. A thing with eyes for teeth, eyes for its tongue and gullet. A thing which has been waiting for me in this moment that has no antecedents and which can spawn no successors. Maybe it waits here for every dying man and woman, for every insect and beast and falling leaf, or maybe some specific quality of my obliteration has brought me to its attention. Possibly, it only catches sight of suicides, and surely I have become that, though your Circe an hands poured the poison draught and then held the spoon. There is such terrible force in this gaze that it seems not implausible that I am the first it has ever beheld, and now it will know all, and it shall have more than knowledge for this opportunity might never come again.

  “Only tell me what happened,” you will say, in some time that cannot ever be, not from when I lie here in the vivarium you have built for me, not from this occasion when I lie exposed to a Cosmos hardly halt considered by the mortal minds contained therein. “Only put down what seems most significant, in retrospect. Do not dwell upon everything you might recall, every perception. You may make a full accounting later.”

  “Later, I might forget something,” I will reply. “It’s not so unlike a dream.” And yon will frown and slide the ink well a little ways across the writing desk towards me. On your face I will see the stain of an anxiety that has been mounting down all the days since my return.

  That will be a lie, of course, for nothing of this will I ever forget. Never shall it fade. I will be taunting you, or through me it will be taunting your heedless curiousity, which even then will remain undaunted. This hour, though, is tar, far away. From when I lie, it is a fancy that can never come to pass—a unicorn, the roaring cataract at the edge of a flat world, a Hell which punishes only those who deserve eternal torment. Around me flows the sea of all beginnings and of all conclusion, and through the weeds and murk, from the peaks of submarine mountains to the lowest vales of Neptune’s sovereignty, benighted in perpetuum—horizon to horizon—does its vision stretch unbroken. And as I have written already observing me it takes away, and observing me it adds to my acumen and marrow. I am increased as much or more than I am consumed, so it must be a fair encounter, when all is said and done.

  Somewhen immeasurably inconceivable to my present-bound mind, a hollow needle pierces my flesh, there in some unforeseeable aftertime, and the hypodermic’s plunger forces into me your concoction of caffeine citrate, cocaine, belladonna, epinephrine, foxglove, etcetera & etcetera. And I think you will be screaming for me to come back, then, to open my eyes, to wake up as if you had only given me over to an afternoon catnap. I would not answer, even now, even with its smothering eyes upon me, in me, performing their metamorphosis. Rut you are calling (wake up, wake up, wake up), and your chemicals are working upon my traitorous physiology, and, worst of all, it wishes me to return whence and from when I have come. It has infected me, or placed within me some fraction of itself, or made from my sentience something suited to its own explorations. Did this never occur to you, my dear? That in those liminal spaces, across the thresholds that separate li
fe from death, might lurk an inhabitant supremely adapted to those climes, and yet also possessed of its own questions, driven by its own peculiar acquisitiveness, seeking always some means to penetrate the veil. I cross one way for you, and I return as another’s experiment, the vessel of another’s inquisition.

  “Breathe, goddamn you!” you will scream, screaming that seems no more or less disingenuous or melodramatic than any actor upon any stage. With your fingers you will clear, have cleared, are evermore clearing my mouth and nostrils of the thickening elixir filling the vivarium tank. “You won’t leave me. I will not let you go. There are no ox carts here, no wagon wheels.”

  But, also, you have, or you will, or at this very second you are placing that fatal spoon upon my tongue.

  And when it is done—if I may arbitrarily use that word here, when—and its modifications are complete, it shuts its eyes, like the sun tumbling down from the sky, and I am tossed helpless back into the rushing flow of time’s river. In the vivarium, I try to draw a breath and vomit milky gouts. At the writing desk, I take the quill you have provided me, and I write—“Wake up,” she whispers. There are long days when I do not have the strength to speak or even sit. The fears of pneumonia and fever, of dementia and some heretofore unseen necrosis triggered by my time away. The relief that begins to show itself as weeks pass and your fears fade slowly, replaced again by that old and indomitable inquisitiveness. The evening that you drained the tank and found something lying at the bottom which you have refused to ever let me see, but keep under lock and key. And this night, which might be new, in our bed in the clingy room above your laboratory, and you bold me in your arms, and I lie with my ear against your breast, listening to the tireless rhythm of your heart winding down, and it listens through me. You think me still but your love, and I let my hand wander across your belly and on, lower, to the damp cleft of your sex. And there also is the day I holed my dying brother. And there are my long walks beside the sea, too, with the winter waves hammering against the Cobb. That brine is only the faintest echo of the tenebrous kingdom I might have named Womb. Overhead, the wheeling gulls mock me, and the freezing wind drives me home again. But always it watches, and it waits, and it studies the intricacies of the winding avenue I have become.

  She rolls through an ether of sighs—

  She revels in a region of sighs...

  Edgar Alan Poe (December 1847)

  Anamnesis, or the Sleepless

  Nights of Léon Spilliaert

  1.

  Not the dreams,” the girl with straw-colored hair and lips the same pale pink as fresh salmon replies. “It isn’t the dreams. It’s the always waking up. That’s the worst of it,” and the psychiatrist watches her the way that psychiatrists watch their prey, which is to say, the same way that cats watch their dying patients. The psychiatrist nods his head, meaning that the girl with straw-colored hair should continue, please, because mice are no fun anymore once they’ve stopped moving about. The girl sits on the sofa in the office three floors above the busy sidewalk, the office which is always much too bright, lit as it is by twin fluorescent suns that wink on and off at the merest flip of the psychiatrist’s thin fingers. Four glass tubes filled with mercury atoms electrified and shocked so violently that they bleed ultraviolet, and the girl shades her eyes and watches the psychiatrist. When she does not speak, he grows impatient and prompts her. “The stairs are steep,” he says, this man who has earned the right to pry inside her skull and pick apart memories and fears and slash equatorial divides between the hemispheres of any brain that should pass too near. There are framed bits of paper hung in the bright office that declare this to be so, calligraphy script and gold seals behind glass, so that the girl and anyone else may not forget his authority in these matters of the cerebrum. “The stairs are very steep,” says the girl, whose name happens to be Acacia, though she has never thought herself to be particularly sharp, in any sense of the word. “They are so steep that were I to lean only a little ways forward I would fall. Anyone would fall. That’s how steep they are.” The psychiatrist nods his head again, as if to say Yes, I’ve heard fill this before. Acacia squints and glances towards the clock, but it’s only been fifteen minutes since she stepped into the office, and so there are still many more minutes in front of her than there are behind. “I sit down, and try not to lean forward. You can’t ever see the bottom, but you can see the darkness that eventually swallows the stairs, down there where the sun can’t ever reach, or the moon, either.” The psychiatrist taps his pencil against a yellow legal pad, the ledger where he tallies all her sins and delusions, her weaknesses and nightmares. He taps his pencil and watches Acacia, and she knows that he only licks his lips because the air in the office is so cold and dry, not because he’s a hungry cat (though he may well be). “You’ve never tried to find the bottom?” he asks, and she tells him no, which is a lie. “I sit down, and I listen to the birds and try not to think about how far it’s going to be, making the climb back up to the top.” The psychiatrist frowns and knits his brow and taps his pencil a little harder. “You’ve seen the top?” he asks her. “No,” she replies. “I have never seen the top, or at least I can’t recall ever having seen the top. It always seems that I’m already following the stairs down when the dream begins.” He writes something, and the sound of his pencil—the deliberate scritch, scritch, scritch of graphite across paper—makes her skin crawl. “Why do you bother to put down the things I’ve said already?” she wants to know, and when he hears the question, the psychiatrist stops writing and licks his lips again. “Why do you feel compelled to repeat yourself?” he asks, and Acacia is never sure of the correct answer and would not risk the wrong one, so she shrugs her shoulders. “The stairs are so white,” she says, thinking of the walls of the psychiatrist’s office, which are white, as well. “I think that they are marble, but I’ve never seen such perfectly white marble. My skin is black against the stairs. Anything is black by comparison. That’s how white the stairs are. Looking down, I cannot tell where my shadow ends and I begin, because the sun is so brilliant and the steps are so awfully white.” He stops writing and starts tapping his pencil against the pad again. “It’s nothing I haven’t told you before,” she says. “It’s nothing I haven’t said a dozen times.” And then she apologizes, and he tells her there’s nothing to be sorry for. The psychiatrist has the sort of face with no sharp edges, like a cat, and she can almost believe, sometimes, that it is a kindly face. “They are not symmetrical,” she goes on, embarrassed by the unnecessary apology, or only at his identifying it as such. “The horizontal face of each step is much narrower, front to back, than the vertical faces are deep, top to bottom.” And she is quite completely certain that she’s being tedious, but in their way, the dreams are tedious, even though they terrify her. “So, they’re very steep,” she adds, and he scratches at his pad again. Acacia grits her teeth and watches the clock, which has made it almost all the way to twenty minutes past the hour. The weight reduced by five full minutes, but the dry, cold air seems no less heavier than it did before. “In the dream,” says the psychiatrist, “you are always naked,” and she says yes, in the dream I am always naked, and she can well imagine all the meanings and significances he might attach to that without having to hear them aloud. “The stairs seem to continue forever,” she tells him. “On my left and on my right, they are so wide I cannot even begin to see the edges. But they curve, too, so I imagine perhaps the staircase is round. That if I followed one of them, in one direction or the other, someday I might return to the place where I began.” How would you know? he does not quite demand. How would yon know, when you’d returned to the point where you’d started? She squints at him a moment before responding, trying again to understand how his face can seem so kind. “Possibly,” she says, “I have a piece of charcoal or a crayon. Then I might make a mark on the marble that I would recognize when I got back to it.” He stares at her and says nothing at all. “Or I might break off a bit on my shadow and use that to
draw the mark.” And at this he smiles, and she catches the dull, wet glint of his nicotine-stained incisors. “That’s something new,” says the psychiatrist, as though she doesn’t know, as if she hasn’t just made it up sitting there on the sofa, shading her eyes from the fluorescent lights. “If you broke off a piece of your shadow,” he mutters, scratching the words onto the yellow paper. When he’s done writing, he looks up and nods so she knows it’s time to say something else.

  2.

  She jerks awake from a dream that is not the endless staircase, and not the agate sea with her balanced precariously there above it, and not the whiplash trees, and not The Curve of the Esplanade. Acacia looks at the old wind-up clock on the table beside her bed and sees that she’s only been asleep for seven minutes. It only seemed like a week or seven days, that mean time-stretching trick of dreams. She blinks, wipes a bit of spittle from her lips, then notes the hour and minute on a dated index card lying next to the clock. She does not note the particular dream.

  She sits up and stares across the room at the dark window. She will not have draperies, as they have always seemed like an attempt to hide something or an attempt to hide from something, and she will do neither. From her bed, Acacia watches the night, first the broad star-dappled sky and then the brick building across the way. It seems, often, she is being asked to make a choice between them, and so each must represent something quite distinct from the other. The calculated order of one aging brick and mortar wall, versus the chaos of all the universe; unless, instead, it’s the choice between a comforting barricade that she may only see just so far, and no farther, or a view that extends all the way back to the very beginning of time. She has by now considered a wide assortment of possible representations and the many choices that would follow from them. She has discussed it, on several occasions, with the psychiatrist—the problem of the night sky and the brick wall—but as always his conclusions strike her as hardly more than recited estimates meant to confine and comfort and dismiss.