by Nick Mamatas
Once I built a tower up to the sun,
Brick and rivet and lime.
Once I built a tower,
Now it’s done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
And when she opens her eyes again, the sun is almost gone, just a blazing sliver remaining now above the sea. She sighs and reminds herself that there is no percentage in recalling the clutter and racket of that lost world. Not now. Not here. Night is coming, sweeping in fast and mean on leathery pterodactyl wings and the wings of flying foxes and the wings of ur-birds, and like so many of the island’s inhabitants, she puts all else from her mind and rises to meet it. The island has made of her a night thing, has stripped her of old diurnal ways. Better to sleep through the stifling equatorial days than to lie awake through the equally stifling nights; better the company of the sun for her uneasy dreams than the moon’s cool, seductive glow and her terror of what might be watching from the cover of darkness.
When she has eaten, she sits awhile near the cliff’s edge, contemplating what month this might be, what month in which year. It is a futile pastime, but mostly a harmless one. At first, she scratched marks on stone to keep track of the passing time, but after only a few hundred marks she forgot one day, and then another, and when she finally remembered, she found she was uncertain how many days had come and gone during her forgetfulness. It was then she came to understood the futility of counting days in this place— indeed, the futility of the very concept of time. She has thought often that the island must be time’s primordial orphan, a castaway, not unlike herself, stranded in some nether or lower region, this sweltering antediluvian limbo where there is only the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the long rainy season which is hardly less hot or less brutal than the longer dry. Maybe the men who built the wall long ago were a race of sorcerers, and in their arrogance they committed a grave transgression against time, some unspeakable contravention of the sanctity of months and hours. And so Chronos cast this place back down into the gulf of Chaos, and now it is damned to exist forever apart from the tick-tock, calendar-page blessings of Aeon.
Yes, she still recalls a few hazy scraps of Greek mythology, and Roman, too, this farmer’s only daughter who always got good marks and waited until school was done before leaving the cornfields of Indiana to go east to seek her fortune in New York and New Jersey. All her girlhood dreams of the stage, the silver screen and her name on theater marquees, but by the time she reached Fort Lee, most of the studios were relocating west to California, following the promise of a more hospitable, more profitable climate. Black Tuesday had left its stain upon the country, and she never found more than extra work at the few remaining studios, happy just to play anonymous faces in crowd scenes and the like, and finally she could not even find that. Finally, she was fit only for the squalor of bread lines and mission soup kitchens and flop houses, until the night she met a man who promised to make her a star, who, chasing dreams of his own, dragged her halfway round the world and then abandoned her here in this serpent-haunted and time-forsaken wilderness. The irony is not lost on her. Seeking fame and adoration, she has found, instead, what might well be the ultimate obscurity.
Below her, some creature suddenly cries out in pain from the forest tangle clinging to the slopes of the mountain, and she watches, squinting into the darkness. She’s well aware that hers are only one of a hundred or a thousand pairs of eyes that have stopped to see, to try and catch a glimpse of whatever bloody panoply is being played out among the vines and undergrowth, and that this is only one of the innumerable slaughters to come before sunrise. Something screams and so all eyes turn to see, for every thing that creeps or crawls, flits or slithers upon the island will fall prey, one day or another. And she is no exception.
One day, perhaps, the island itself will fall, not so unlike the dissatisfied angels in Milton or in Blake.
Ann Darrow opens her eyes, having nodded off again, and she is once more only a civilized woman not yet grown old, but no longer young. One who has been taken away from the world and touched, then returned and set adrift in the sooty gulches and avenues and asphalt ravines of this modern, electric city. But that was such a long time ago, before the war that proved the Great War was not so very great after all, that it was not the war to end all wars. Japan has been burned with the fire of two tiny manufactured suns and Europe lies in ruins, and already the fighting has begun again and young men are dying in Korea. History is a steamroller. History is a litany of war.
She sits alone in the Natural History Museum off Central Park, a bench all to herself in the alcove where the giant ape’s broken skeleton was mounted for public exhibition after the creature tumbled from the top of the Empire State, plummeting more than twelve hundred feet to the frozen streets below. There is an informative placard (white letters on black) declaring it Brontopithecus singularis Osborn (1934), only known specimen, now believed extinct. So there, she thinks. Denham and his men dragged it from the not-quite-impenetrable sanctuary of its jungle and hauled it back to Broadway; they chained it and murdered it and, in that final act of desecration, they named it. The enigma was dissected and quantified, given its rightful place in the grand analytic scheme, in the Latinized order of things, and that’s one less blank spot to cause the mapmakers and zoologists to scratch their heads. Now, Carl Denham’s monster is no threat at all, only another harmless, impressive heap of bones shellacked and wired together in this stately, static mausoleum. And hardly anyone remembers or comes to look upon these bleached remains. The world is a steamroller. The 8th Wonder of the World was old news twenty years ago, and now it is only a chapter in some dusty textbook devoted to anthropological curiosities.
He was the king and the god of the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Curiosity killed the cat, and it slew the ape, as well, and that December night hundreds died for the price of a theater ticket, the fatal price of their curiosity and Carl Denham’s hubris. By dawn, the passion play was done, and the king and god of Skull Island lay crucified by biplanes, by the pilots and trigger-happy Navy men borne aloft in Curtis Helldivers armed with .50 caliber machine guns. A tiered Golgotha skyscraper, one-hundred-and-two stories of steel and glass and concrete, a dizzying Art-Deco Calvary, and no resurrection save what the museum’s anatomists and taxidermists might in time effect.
Ann Darrow closes her eyes, because she can only ever bear to look at the bones for just so long and no longer. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s former president, had wanted to name it after her, in her honor—Brontopithecus darrowii, “Darrow’s thunder ape”—but she’d threatened a lawsuit against him and his museum and the scientific journal publishing his paper, and so he’d christened the species singularis, instead. She played her Judas role, delivering the jungle god to Manhattan’s Roman holiday, and wasn’t that enough? Must she also have her name forever nailed up there with the poor beast’s corpse? Maybe she deserved as much or far worse, but Osborn’s “honor” was poetic justice she managed to evade.
There are voices now, a mother and her little girl, so Ann knows that she’s no longer alone in the alcove. She keeps her eyes tightly shut, wishing she could shut her ears as well and not hear the things that are being said.
“Why did they kill him?” asks the little girl.
“It was a very dangerous animal,” her mother replies sensibly. “It got loose and hurt people. I was just a child then, about your age.”
“They could have put it in a zoo,” the girl protests. “They didn’t have to kill it.”
“I don’t think a zoo would ever have been safe. It broke free and hurt a lot of innocent people.”
“But there aren’t any more like it.”
“There are still plenty of gorillas in Africa,” the mother replies.
“Not that big,” says the little girl. “Not as big as an elephant.”
“No,” the mother agrees. “Not as big as an elephant. But then we h
ardly need gorillas as big as elephants, now do we?”
Ann clenches her jaws, grinding her teeth together, biting her tongue (so to speak) and gripping the edge of the bench with nails chewed down to the quicks.
They’ll leave soon, she reminds herself. They always do, get bored and move along after only a minute or so. It won’t be much longer.
“What does that part say?” the child asks eagerly, so her mother reads to her from the text printed on the placard.
“Well, it says, ‘Kong was not a true gorilla, but a close cousin, and belongs in the Superfamily Hominoidea with gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons, and human beings. His exceptional size might have evolved in response to his island isolation.’”
“What’s a super family?”
“I don’t really know, dear.”
“What’s a gibbon?”
“I think it’s a sort of monkey.”
“But we don’t believe in evolution, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
“So God made Kong, just like he made us?”
“Yes, honey. God made Kong.”
And then there’s a pause, and Ann holds her breath, wishing she were still dozing, still lost in her terrible dreams, because this waking world is so much more terrible.
“I want to see the Tyrannosaurus again,” says the little girl, “and the Triceratops, too.” Her mother says okay, there’s just enough time to see the dinosaurs again before we have to meet your Daddy, and Ann sits still and listens to their footsteps on the polished marble floor, growing fainter and fainter until silence has at last been restored to the alcove. But now the sterile, drab museum smells are gone, supplanted by the various rank odors of the apartment Jack rented for the both of them before he shipped out on a merchant steamer, the Polyphemus, bound for the Azores and then Lisbon and the Mediterranean. He never made it much farther than São Miguel, because the steamer was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat and went down with all hands onboard. Ann opens her eyes, and the strange dream of the museum and the ape’s skeleton has already begun to fade. It isn’t morning yet, and the lamp beside the bed washes the tiny room with yellow-white light that makes her eyes ache.
She sits up, pushing the sheets away, exposing the ratty grey mattress underneath. The bedclothes are damp with her sweat and with radiator steam, and she reaches for the half-empty gin bottle there beside the lamp. The booze used to keep the dreams at bay, but these last few months, since she got the telegram informing her that Jack Driscoll was drowned and given up for dead and she would never be seeing him again, the nightmares have seemed hardly the least bit intimidated by alcohol. She squints at the clock, way over on the chifforobe, and sees that it’s not yet even four a.m. Still hours until sunrise, hours until the bitter comfort of winter sunlight through the bedroom curtains. She tips the bottle to her lips, and the liquor tastes like turpentine and regret and everything she’s lost in the last three years. Better she would have never been anything more than a starving woman stealing apples and oranges to try to stay alive, better she would have never stepped foot on the Venture. Better she would have died in the green hell of that uncharted island. She can easily imagine a thousand ways it might have gone better, all grim but better than this drunken half-life. She does not torture herself with fairy-tale fantasies of happy endings that never were and never will be. There’s enough pain in the world without that luxury.
She takes another swallow from the bottle, then reminds herself that it has to last until morning and sets it back down on the table. But morning seems at least as far away as that night on the island, as far away as the carcass of the sailor she married. Often, she dreams of him, gnawed by the barbed teeth of deep-sea fish and mangled by shrapnel, burned alive and rotted beyond recognition, tangled in the wreckage and ropes and cables of a ship somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He peers out at her with eyes that are no longer eyes at all, but only empty sockets where eels and spiny albino crabs nestle. She usually wakes screaming from those dreams, wakes to the asshole next door pounding on the wall with the heel of a shoe or just his bare fist and shouting how he’s gonna call the cops if she can’t keep it down. He has a job and has to sleep, and he can’t have some goddamn rummy broad half the bay over or gone crazy with the DTs keeping him awake. The old Italian cunt who runs this dump, she says she’s tired of hearing the complaints, and either the hollering stops or Ann will have to find another place to flop. She tries not to think about how she’ll have to find another place soon, anyway. She had a little money stashed in the lining of her coat, from all the interviews she gave the papers and magazines and the newsreel people, but now it’s almost gone. Soon, she’ll be back out on the bum, sleeping in mission beds or worse places, whoring for the sauce and as few bites of food as she can possibly get by on. Another month, at most, and isn’t that what they mean by coming full circle?
She lies down again, trying not to smell herself or the pillowcase or the sheets, thinking about bright July sun falling warm between green leaves. And soon, she drifts off once more, listening to the rumble of a garbage truck down on Canal Street, the rattle of its engine and the squeal of its breaks not so very different from the primeval grunts and cries that filled the torrid air of the ape’s profane cathedral.
And perhaps now she is lying safe and drunk in a squalid Bowery tenement and only dreaming away the sorry dregs of her life, and it’s not the freezing morning when Jack led her from the skyscraper’s spire down to the bedlam of Fifth Avenue. Maybe these are nothing more than an alcoholic’s fevered recollections, and she is not being bundled in wool blankets and shielded from reporters and photographers and the sight of the ape’s shattered body.
“It’s over,” says Jack, and she wants to believe that’s true, by all the saints in Heaven and all the sinners in Hell, wherever and whenever she is, she wants to believe that it is finally and irrevocably over. There is not one moment to be relived, not ever again, because it has ended, and she is rescued, like Beauty somehow delivered from the clutching paws of the Beast. But there is so much commotion, the chatter of confused and frightened bystanders, the triumphant, confident cheers and shouting of soldiers and policemen, and she’s begging Jack to get her out of it, away from it. It must be real, all of it, real and here and now, because she has never been so horribly cold in her dreams. She shivers and stares up at the narrow slice of sky visible between the buildings. The summit of that tallest of all tall towers is already washed with dawn, but down here on the street, it may as well still be midnight.
Life is just a bowl of cherries.
Don’t take it serious; it’s too mysterious.
At eight each morning I have got a date,
To take my plunge ‘round the Empire State.
You’ll admit it’s not the berries,
In a building that’s so tall . . .
“It’s over,” Jack assures her for the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time. “They got him. The airplanes got him, Ann. He can’t hurt you, not anymore.”
And she’s trying to remember through the clamor of voices and machines and the popping of flash bulbs—Did he hurt me? Is that what happened?—when the crowd divides like the holy winds of Jehovah parting the waters for Moses, and for the first time she can see what’s left of the ape. And she screams, and they all think she’s screaming in terror at the sight of a monster. They do not know the truth, and maybe she does not yet know herself and it will be weeks or months before she fully comprehends why she is standing there screaming and unable to look away from the impossible, immense mound of black fur and jutting white bone and the dark rivulets of blood leaking sluggishly from the dead and vanquished thing.
“Don’t look at it,” Jack says, and he covers her eyes with a callused palm. “It’s nothing you need to see.”
So she does not see, shutting her bright blue eyes and all the eyes of her soul, the eyes without and those other eyes within. Shutting herself, slamming closed doors and windows of perception, and how
could she have known that she was locking in more than she was locking out. Don’t look at it, he said, much too late, and these images are burned forever into her lidless, unsleeping mind’s eye.
A sable hill from which red torrents flow.
Ann kneels in clay and mud the color of a slaughterhouse floor, all the shades of shit and blood and gore, and dips her fingertips into the stream. She has performed this simple act of prostration times beyond counting, and it no longer holds for her any revulsion. She comes here from her nest high in the smoldering ruins of Manhattan and places her hand inside the wound, like St. Thomas fondling the pierced side of Christ. She comes down to remember, because there is an unpardonable sin in forgetting such a forfeiture. In this deep canyon molded not by geologic upheaval and erosion but by the tireless, automatic industry of man, she bows her head before the black hill. God sleeps there below the hill, and one day he will awaken from his slumber, for all those in the city are not faithless. Some still remember and follow the buckled blacktop paths, weaving their determined pilgrims’ way along decaying thoroughfares and between twisted girders and the tumbledown heaps of burnt-out rubble. The city was cast down when God fell from his throne (or was pushed, as some have dared to whisper), and his fall broke apart the ribs of the world and sundered even the progression of one day unto the next so that time must now spill backwards to fill in the chasm. Ann leans forward, sinking her hand in up to the wrist, and the steaming crimson stream begins to clot and scab where it touches her skin.
Above her, the black hill seems to shudder, to shift almost imperceptibly in its sleep.
