Speaking to Skull Kings

by Emily B. Cataneo

  You also see people who remember the rondelium girls, but who hate to admit to any involvement with them. Last August, as I ordered a drink in a basement café off Rue Mouffetard, an elbow jostled me. A portly man swiveled around: Gustav, who I’d known before his bald spot and broken veins, when we studied at the Sorbonne together, when Andrei and I first began our rondelium experiments.

  He snorted. “Can I get a drink?” he shouted at the bartender.

  I gripped his forearm, about to blurt out questions: have you seen the original Rondelium Girl, who flew at the Exposition Universelle ten years ago? Can you help me and Andrei?

  He jerked back and knocked a glass off the bar. It shattered on the sticky floor.

  “Don’t you dare touch me,” he snarled. “You’re poisoned, aren’t you? Don’t deny it, you look like death. Serves you right, after—”

  “So pious for a man who sat in the front row at the exposition, Gustav,” I said. I hated him for that, him and all the students and professors who had once devoured our research on rondelium, who had clamored for more information about the rondelium girls after the exposition.

  That night, in our flat on Rue Marseilles, Andrei curled in his bed like an empty sack.

  “I saw Gustav tonight,” I told him.

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “He wouldn’t speak to me, smug—”

  “Katerina. I said no.”

  My lamplight fell on the shiny white warts limning his arms, his swollen finger-joints. He squinted his cataract-clouded eyes. “I don’t want to hear about any of those people anymore. I’d rather forget them.”

  “But what if…what if she comes back?”

  Andrei turned away.

  “She would, if she knew how much we needed her. She probably doesn’t know.” The warts on my own arms tingled.

  “She probably hasn’t seen the query I put in the Journal, or—”

  “Give it up.” Andrei draped his arms over his face.

  I retreated into our parlor, where our rondelium had once gleamed in glass tubes. We had sold it long ago, to pay for the bread and wine that we needed through these long brittle years, before the current generation of researchers discovered that rondelium cures rondelium poisoning.

  I knelt at the window, peered through the wrought-iron box overflowing with dead geraniums, at the empty street below. I rested my cheek on the lumpy warts on my left arm.

  Someday, I imagined, the Rondelium Girl would return. She would appear on the cobblestones beneath that window, her wings glowing brighter than any streetlight. She would shout, “Katie, the keys, if you please,” and I’d throw the keys to her as I always had before, in that long-ago spring and summer.

  * * *

  Andrei and I met the Rondelium Girl when she was just an ordinary girl, when we were just two students who had traveled west to study chemistry at the Sorbonne. We scrounged together enough francs to take a bus to the Bois de Vincennes, where a Ferris wheel cut through the sky across the lake, and my stocking scraped against cold pavement through my cracked saddle shoe. Andrei hummed the chickens and cows song, the one Mama had always sung when she’d churned butter. The smell of chestnuts wafted from one of the vendors; I rummaged in my pocket, pulled out a handful of lint and a button.

  “Need to borrow some coins?”

  A girl lounged on a bench near us. Cherry juice stained her white gloves and a pretty line of moles extended across her plump cheek.

  “I’m sure I have some francs here somewhere.” I patted my pockets.

  “My dear sister has the endless capacity for hope,” Andrei said. “I’ll buy you some chestnuts,” the girl said, and before I could protest she had sashayed off to a vendor. Andrei stared at the curve of her shoulder blades above the back of her dress.

  “Oh Andrei, what would Mama say? She’s French,” I joked.

  “Shall I pray the rosary for you?”

  “Shh.” Andrei jabbed me in the ribs.

  The girl returned, handed me a paper packet of chestnuts.

  “I’m dreadfully bored, so you’ll have to forgive me for accosting strangers in the park. Mama and Papa are off with my siblings and I’m left all alone.”

  I bit into one of the chestnuts. “Come with us, then. Andrei and I were going to ride the Ferris wheel.”

  “No, you said you wanted to ride the Ferris wheel. I said I wasn’t going anywhere near that death trap.”

  “You’ll miss out on your first chance to fly? Come on, let’s go.”

  “I…I’m game.” The girl lifted her chin. “It looks rather dangerous, doesn’t it?”

  We cajoled Andrei into joining us. The girl paid for our tickets and we crowded together three to a seat—we were all slender-hipped and lanky in those days. As we reached the wheel’s apex and the trees and hazy roofs of Paris spread before us, with the brand-new Eiffel Tower puncturing the clouds, the girl emitted a tiny delighted laugh.

  There are some days, moments, memories that play in our minds as though we are watching a motion picture. When I close my eyes now, I can see the girl’s cherry-stained gloves, as though I could reach out and touch them. I can feel the pavement scraping against the bottom of my foot and taste the meaty chestnuts on my tongue.

  * * *

  As August crept into autumn, the cataracts clouded Andrei’s eyes. “Look, I’ll find one of your favorite books,” I said, rummaging through the stack piled next to his bed. “Here, Crime and Punishment.”

  “No.”

  “What about this?” I pulled out a yellowed newspaper, its edges crumbling. “The article you wrote about how rondelium promotes weightlessness and the—”

  “No.” Andrei jerked up in bed, his cloudy eyes focused on a spot three feet to my left. “She’s gone. Even if she did come back, I wouldn’t be able to see her.”

  “Unless she cured—”

  Andrei’s swollen fingers clamped into the warts on my wrist. “She’s not coming back.” He dug harder into my skin and I ground my teeth. “I’m sick of protecting you. Chickens and cows, chickens and cows, well, you’re not a little girl anymore. She’s not coming back. And you know what, Katerina?”

  The clock ticked.

  “You don’t believe it either.”

  “Yes I—”

  “No, you don’t,” Andrei said. “Because you haven’t tried very hard to find her, have you?”

  Andrei dropped my wrist and wrapped himself in dirty sheets.

  I fled the apartment. Out of breath, I emerged on the embankment and raced past the shuttered-tight bouquinistes, towards Notre Dame’s glowing jewel windows.

  The truth is, Andrei was correct. Yes, I had placed the ad in the Journal. I had spent long nights dreaming about her return. I had tried to ask Gustav if he had seen her.

  But in the ten years since the exposition, I hadn’t done more than that.

  Because I clung to the theory that she didn’t know we were poisoned, that she had no idea I watched the street every night dreaming of chestnuts and Ferris wheels. If I found her and she refused to help us, it would destroy me.

  But Andrei needed her, and so I approached the plaza that sprawls before the cathedral. Most of the beggars had left for the night, but against the stones of the cathedral, blue glimmered, like a moth in the dark.

  I charged forward. It wasn’t her, of course: this rondelium girl’s nose curved hawkish. Her wings trailed bedraggled around her, ripped, glowing.

  “Please, alms for the—” Her eyes rose to my face, and her lips curled back.

  My stomach churned. I remembered her. Victoire. She had screamed loudest of all of them. Then she had written that article, about the pain, about how she had become poisonous, about how she could hover above the ground, but not truly fly.

  It had turned everyone against us.

  “Have you seen her?” I said.

  “Why should I tell you that?” Victoire unfolded, rose up. “Why in God’s name would I help you?”

  She wh
ipped around. Through the hole in her ripped dress, her wings protruded from a maw in her back, fresh blood gleaming on the metal stitches.

  “It never healed,” she said. “It never healed.”

  The sound of an accordion trailed from one of the bridges. Someone laughed loud, by the water. I wrapped my arms tight around my chest.

  We hadn’t meant to hurt them. I hadn’t meant for the wing-wounds to remain raw forever, or for the flying experiments to falter and fail. I hadn’t meant for them to poison their beaux and mothers and brothers with the rondelium. I thought the eager girls who visited Andrei’s and my flat to receive their wings, after they saw the Rondelium Girl at the exposition, would soar over Paris’ rooftops, shining effervescent, not wilt begging before Notre Dame.

  “I am sorry,” I said to her bloody back. “I am. I really am. But Andrei is dying. I know your wings can heal us, because only rondelium can heal—”

  “I will tell you where she is, if you’d like,” Victoire said. “Do you know the Bois de Vincennes? She’s there. She lives under an abandoned Ferris wheel. Oh, you think I’ve had a change of heart? Don’t. Go see her. You’ll find out. She despises you too.”

  She grinned, feral, and melted into the shadows.

  I walked down the embankment, over glittering bridges and broken sidewalks, limping through the pain in my hip that’s sprung up in the past five years. I stopped at a vendor and bought a packet of chestnuts, but they tasted dusty, as though the shells had gotten mixed up with the meat.

  I leaned over the railing at the Pont Alexandre, my heart pattering with the knowledge that I knew where she was, that I could go see her right then, if I wanted to.

  I stared at the Eiffel Tower around the bend of the river. From that distance, it was easy to pretend it was still new, a shining gleaming symbol of possibility, instead of just a metal tower, vandalized with chewing gum and rusting against the night sky.

  * * *

  “Rondelium. It promotes weightlessness on objects and people in close proximity.” Andrei closed his eyes and kissed the side of the Rondelium Girl’s head. We browsed in a bookstore by the river, brushing shoulders with other Parisians wearing cotton in the July heat. “The scientific applications…”

  “Weightlessness? So it could cause objects to simply blow away like feathers?” The Rondelium Girl’s heavy pale eyebrows rose.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “It decreases a person’s weight enough to promote flight.” In those days, I spent so much of my time in the laboratory with rondelium that I felt rather weightless myself; I could see all my veins like handmade lace through my paper-thin skin, and I could leap down Rue Marseilles with my feet barely touching the ground.

  “Ah, yes.” Andrei picked up a book off a table: that copy of Crime and Punishment, the cover slick and the pages unfolded. “The rondelium girls.”

  “Girls with rondelium-infused wings,” I said. “Andrei and I have been working on the prototype all year, and we’re preparing an article for the academy. We think we’ll make the wings of linen, a layer of rondelium, then a thin coating of glass.”

  “In the cities of the future, the rondelium girls will be integral as—” Andrei said.

  “They’ll be able to fly, soar like…like beacons of tomorrow,” I said. “Beautiful.”

  Our Rondelium Girl grinned, and under the glow of her smile, the rest of the bookstore dimmed into dust.

  Andrei and the Rondelium Girl may have been engaged, involved in that kind of love, but I’ve always believed that she and I truly knew each other, deep inside of ourselves. For example, that night, Andrei stayed at the café late, and the Rondelium Girl and I climbed the rickety fire escape behind the building on Rue Marseilles and sat on the roof, deep in the throes of a July night, as we did so many times that summer.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me earlier, about the rondelium girls.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, tilted her chin to the glowing sky. “I can imagine, in just five years, us sitting up here and watching them soaring through—”

  “I think about that all the time.”

  “Do you think…it would be dangerous? Like the Ferris wheel?” She cocked her head so the lights from the city leapt over her cheekbones. She had lost weight since she came to live with us on Rue Marseilles.

  “Of course, but—”

  “The best things always are, right?”

  “It could be you.” The words tumbled out of me. I knew Andrei had thought it too.

  “Sorry?”

  “You could be the first rondelium girl.”

  “What…me? You think I could?”

  “Of course. You’d be perfect for it. You’re charming and you can sing and carry yourself.”

  “You…you think so?” She turned to me, grinning. “I could be the one flying, out there. Why, I could—”

  “You’d make history. You’d be the most beloved girl in all of Paris.”

  “Katie, I can’t imagine how wonderful it would be—you think I…. When can we begin?”

  “Well, Andrei and I are still conducting experiments on the best ways to make the wings and the best ways to attach them, but we should be finished by early autumn.”

  “The best ways to attach them.” Her brow creased. “Will this…will it hurt?”

  “Of course not,” I said, and I had no reason, back then, to believe otherwise.

  “Hmm.” She shot me a strained smile, and I continued to describe how the world would adore her once she became a rondelium girl. But she answered me curtly, and soon after she said she was tired, and retreated downstairs to the flat, while the first autumn wind blew and blew and blew off the clouds above me.

  * * *

  Andrei and I had not spoken since our quarrel. I sat on the bed beside him, stroked his hair off his forehead. His stomach bloated under his shirt.

  Rondelium. The element that promotes weightlessness and that we thought would promote flight…after Andrei and I left the Sorbonne in disgrace, the next generation of researchers discovered that exposure to rondelium and then lack of exposure to rondelium disturbs all the body’s systems, as the bones hollow and then refill, as the skin thins, then grows tough and warty.

  I stroked Andrei’s forehead, wishing we had never sold our rondelium, wishing she would return to us, wrap him in her wings. I sang him the song about the chickens and the cows. I had never sung it to him before. I imagined his lips moving, his voice chiming in before the chorus, him bellowing about the chicken that tried to fly.

  But he didn’t even open his eyes. So I shrugged into my woolen coat, left the flat and hurried down Rue Marseilles while rain whipped against my face.

  * * *

  “You’re sure it won’t hurt?”

  She studied her stained gloves, instead of the two pieces of silk, cheesecloth, and glass that dangled from metal rods in the corner of the room. Autumn rain lashed the windows outside and we hadn’t lit our lamps, so the wings glowed the colors of the rain.

  “After it’s done, you’ll be able to fold them up or extend them at will, see, because of these.” I ran my fingers over the steel supports that trisected the wings. We had already tried strapping the wings onto her back using a harness, but she had failed to achieve the proper control that way. It had been Andrei’s idea to try alternative methods in our own laboratory, away from the watchful eye of the academy.

  “Do we have to do it tomorrow?” she said.

  “You need time to learn to fly with them before the exposition.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “I think you should sing while you fly. Something modern, none of that old-fashioned nonsense, and it’ll be—”

  “I’m not sure I want to do it.”

  Rain against the windows. I couldn’t believe it. How could she not want this opportunity? This was the chance of a lifetime, and I told her so.

  “What if I decide I don’t like them in a few months?

  What if—”

  “
I promise you’ll like them. Why, everyone will want to be like you.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  Why didn’t I do it? I can’t remember now. I must have had a good reason. I must have been needed for the procedure. I must have known that she would make a better rondelium girl than I would.

  My reason couldn’t have been fear. Why, when I was young, I was fearless. That’s why she and I first became friends, on the Ferris wheel. I told her as much, that I had thought she wasn’t afraid of anything, and we quarreled, until dusk fell outside. Then she left. She didn’t come back all night, and I paced the laboratory in the dull glow of the wings while Andrei sat in the corner with his head in his hands.

  But at dawn, she appeared in the sun-washed, rain-slick street below. I found out later that she had spent the night riding the Ferris wheel, staring at the city lights until they burned into her retinas.

  “Throw down the keys, Katie,” she shouted. “I’m ready.”

  * * *

  Blood speckled the backs of my hands. She didn’t scream. Her face was buried in a pillow, and besides, we had pressed an ether mask over her mouth, so the pain must have been dulled. It must have. Her shoulder blades contracted and Andrei pressed down on them, keeping her still, while I dug the curved metal needle through her skin, binding the steel rods against her spine with metal stitches. A line of soft moles dotted the skin of her back. I inserted a needle through one of them.

  Andrei hummed the chickens and cows song, and I snapped at him, “Don’t distract me, Andrei, I need to concentrate,” and he said, “I’m not singing it for you.”

  Did we deserve what she did to us? I sliced a needle through her back, turned her into poison. But then she abandoned me for ten years—on the night of our greatest triumph—leaving me to these warts creeping over my arms, leaving me to wonder whether she’s alive, what she thinks about on summer nights without me. We loved each other, but we hurt each other so much.

  And yet, I clutched onto hope that someday, if she knew I still loved her, still needed her, she would return to us and heal Andrei and everything would be the same as when we were young.