“And just what the hell does that—” But Ptolema doesn’t finish. Instead, she rushes to the railing and hurls into the Liffey. And when the cramps and dry heaves finally pass, there’s no sign whatsoever of the redhead. She may as well have been a ghost. A hallucination. A false memory.
5.: How Ghosts Affect Relationships
(1/1/2001; 12:01:01 a.m.)
It is everything but an understatement to call this room white. It is white in so absolute a sense that it is almost impossible for the eye to detect the intersection of angles where the four walls meet ceiling, where ceiling meets walls, where walls meet floor, to pick out each individual object placed within the room, for all of these are completely white, as well. The furnishings are few and plain: a bed, a nightstand, a white lamp with a white lampshade, a blank white canvas within a white frame, a white table and two white chairs—one placed at the north end of the table and one at the south. On the southern wall, there is a window, one window with white drapes. Outside, snow is falling so hard the land and sky blur together, whiteout conditions. The white door with its white marble knob is set into the eastern wall. However, any sense of direction would be lost as soon as one were to dare enter the white room. Indeed, even the ability to tell up from down would be jeopardized. That is how achromatic is this room.
Though Lizbeth Margeride has no recollection of ever once having entered the room, she has been here many, many times, and, in its way, each time has been different. But always her awareness of being here begins with her seated in the white chair at the southern end of the table, facing her sister, Elle, who sits at the northern end, facing her. Both of them are wearing nothing but white camiknickers that would have been fashionable in the 1930s, with matching white stockings and Mary Janes. There is a chessboard on the table between them, and it, too, is entirely white, every one of the sixty-four squares precisely identical and yet unmistakably distinct.
The first violation of the room’s immaculateness is the sixteen and sixteen chess pieces themselves, as there are both white and black pieces. The black pieces are arranged before Lizbeth, and the white before Elle. It is appropriate, Lizbeth thinks, as Lizbeth always thinks, that her sister will make the opening move, as is ever the privilege of white, in keeping with the color scheme of the white room.
The second violation is the sisters themselves. Though their hair and eyebrows are almost as pale as the room, their milky skin seems just shy of pink in this place, and their blue eyes are as radiant as star sapphires. Their twenty fingernails have been polished crimson. Their lips are rouged. Shocking dabs of color amid the tyranny of white.
White.
This is the illusion of a single “color” perceived by the three sorts of cone cells present in the human eye when confronted simultaneously with all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum at once. White isn’t the absence of color, as many mistakenly believe. It is, rather, the perfect reflection and perception of all colors, therefore the antithesis of black—black being perfect absorption, which is the perception of the absence of color.
Elle moves her queen’s white knight ahead two spaces and one space west.
Lizbeth studies the move. It may seem hours before she counters.
One must move with the utmost care.
Too much is always at stake.
Always.
Sometimes, even the gods themselves are merely pieces in a higher game, and the players of this game, in turn, are merely pieces in an endless hierarchy of larger chessboards.
“My move,” Lizbeth says.
“Take all the time you need, love,” answers Elle, as she always does. “What matter if you take a hundred years?”
She speaks with neither malice nor restlessness.
“A slow sort of country,” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
Beyond the white door lies an endless white hallway. Lizbeth knows this instinctually, though she has never once stood, crossed the room, and dared to open the door. There is a soft horror in all this white that would be increased a hundredfold, she suspects, if the door were ever opened.
I don’t really think it’s a hallway at all.
It’s a maze.
The white hands of the white clock on the white wall count off the seconds, minutes, and hours. There is too much time here, and there is no time at all. In all this white, Lizbeth’s thoughts inevitably begin to blur, which is unfair, as one needs clarity for chess, and her sister always gets the first move, being always white, and so still has clarity before the onset of the blur. This room is, Lizbeth thinks, a cathedral to . . .
To what? Closed systems where entropy prevails? A permutation of the second law of thermodynamics? Quantum mechanical zero-point energy? Dissolution? The Nernst heat theorem?
Insanity?
Faultless sanity?
“If you’re cold, love,” Elle says to her, “you may open the window.”
I may, yes. No one and nothing is stopping me.
Then comes the third violation. Her name is not Twisby, but that’s the only name she has ever provided the twins. Or her name is not Thisby. There is sometimes contention between the sisters on this point, but the woman has never offered a definitive answer, no matter how many times they’ve inquired. She is someone we will meet. Lizbeth knows that, just as she knows that her first move will involve a pawn, no matter how much she wishes otherwise. She knows that the woman is threat and shelter, peril and deliverance. A future catalyst. When the woman speaks, the air shimmers and the twins turn towards her in unison. The legs of their white chairs scrape, in unison, as a single sound, against the white floor.
“There is but one evil,” the woman named Twisby (or Thisby) tells them. “Only a single sin. It is waste. Were it not for me and what I will teach you when you are ready, you would be wasted. I cannot abide that. I will come to light the fuse. To provide the push that will be necessary to begin the—” She pauses, then adds, “To begin the cascade.”
The woman opens her hands. Her left palm has been painted as red as the twin’s lips and fingernails. Her right is the color of Lizbeth’s chess pieces, which is to say all colors.
“Quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness,” says Twisby (or Thisby). “But this is only your cocoon, Lizbeth. This is only your cocoon, Elle. Such a metamorphosis awaits you. You will see. There will be no waste. No sin. No evil.”
And then she’s gone.
“Your move,” says Elle.
“Yes,” replies Lizbeth. “My move.”
When at last she wakes from the dream of the white room, Lizbeth Margeride lies very still, smelling her own sweat on the damp sheets, and she keeps her eyes trained on her sister, still fast asleep in her own bed. She watches Elle until dreams come again.
6 .: Late Saturday Night Motel Signal
(Atlanta/Manhattan, 8/9/2035) [Part 1]
Well, baby, I came here for more than that. I’ve seen self-disembowelings, the ballet of now-time Americanized seppuku, hara-kiri, performance-nuanced 腹切り dazzling in scarlet river splendor. I cover the war, as is the battle cry in these nether ditches of secrecy that all are meant to see, as many as will watch. Cryptic voyeurism, right, bitcast for the world if it bothers to look or glances in by accident. Now, that, I think and always have thought, must be the cat’s velvet paw: Überraschung, mothercocksucker! Looking for peeptalk line telly, a bit of footsy ball or hoops, and here’s this bitch over there on the bed turning herself inside out. But yeah, no. I ain’t taken this job and come to this shitty Chinatown flop for no floor show. My motives are, shall we say, ulterior. I’m here for the other thing. I’m chasing a ghost. Her names, she has so very many now—like mind tattoos or identity memes ladled by the fans—all of which run irrelevant to my purpose.
I am assuming I have anything as concrete as a purpose.
See here, all of this web been
spun from out a dream I cannot stop having, an echo’s echo coughed up from my scorch-fed back brain, 404-transcription breakdown between my dear and darling hippocampus and neocortex, expectation fulfillment retro-slip out activation-synthesis. Sara White Queen of auld lang syne, how she collected dreams in blue-bottle skullfuck yottabyte quantum cat boxes. SWQ Check, do love such like REM of serotonin and histamine reflux. Now, how-some-ever, is she gone away across the grey Atlantic to Londontown and left me all alone. We are both drawn to our half-drowned burgs, and I could clip the sleeping phantasies across the satellite handoffs to her, sure. But I won’t. I might let some snick whore suck me off standing right the fuck here in Room 707, but my subconscious sick, that’s not for any brigand flensing the sky who just happens across them in hisherit’s driftnet by-catch. I want her to have them, I’ll hand deliver.
I digress.
I did spend some days and nights down Atlanta way. This was before those homebrew prepper Hitler fetishists popped off the CDC containment protocol and the city went what it is today. This was in The Day, back in, and I am during these rapid repeater dreams towered high above the Midtown rabble, in a room always different from this room tonight. Wait, no, yes. That’s how I meant to couch that. I am there in a suite I never could in all my squalid lives pony up, but I am there, regardless, and the Woman in White, Lady of the Many Names, there is she, as well. Down in the guts, covering the war, you hear tell of the WiW, though she’s a tripper urban legendary lady, not what you put your eyes and hands upon. But for a happenstance few only a necessary fiction to be exploited by the blippers. Still, there she is, sparklesome as December tinsel treeforms, and she says, and I gaze out at the neon sodium-arc headlight mercury vapor OLED thoroughfares like Jesus in his high place of temptation. And she says, I said, and what exactly does it matter the precise of her words? She says them, and she says them to me. And mallet to the meat, that is. The air outside the vast window is swarmed of a sudden with flittering crowblack wings, raven eyes, a vortex of feather beats upon the twilight. She says, though it might have been any, but let’s set down some arbitrate specificity, she says the names of Not Gods and all their not-holy retinues in turn. Dapper scar, you bet. Cuts my throat in essence, those immemorial words that could spell The Over Ending if there’s any truth in her book.
Well, let me not here do the untruthful pitter-pat. Not her book, at least in my dream it’s not her book. It is, no, rather, hauled from out the sea, and she says hauled from out the sea off the coast of Massachusetts, twixt Boston and Provincetown. Except other times, when says hauled from the Sea of Maine. She sits tidy in a comfy big damn chair, smoking and reading to me from the undrowned volume. Oh, I haven’t, no, not have I asked to hear the gospel long written down, but that don’t stop her. She is a big spun herself gossamer off the cuff, as they say of her in Old New Amsterdam. A being of her own devising, and that includes not soliciting the opinions of those to whom she evangelizes.
Lo, whiche sleighets and subtilitees . . .
Our all-media suicide du jour accepts from her jisatsu second the nightly’s highstand tantō. The suicide is dressed in hooker’s lace and gild, which says so much and hardly anything else at all. This is how they would have her, the penitentses, the gawking predynastic underdogs, the slavering, and the casually curious got the best of them. She both gazes into the camera’s eye and the camera gazes from her own complex optical system, her twin gelatin vitreous seas. Before this night, she was fitted with the host’s pricey implants so it flows both ways, receive and transmit, because who does not want a good and for all of the faces of the audience she has called from every cranny and nook and penthouse shitter? Myself, covering the war, all I need for the job of work has been seen to by the network engineers and underling sawbones. She grips the samurai knife tightly in both hands, hilt bedward, blade to the low popcorn ceiling. Mind wandering, as I am not here to see that, I wouldn’t wonder if that ceiling were sprayed in place all the way back in the nineteen ands. I’m chatting up the live feed with my shifting thoughts, and a producer whose name I can’t recall, she reminds me I promised her to keep off my come-natural street shanty. I tell her she can two-second delay and run it through the translators. She says a bad word, and then, well, she says a few more.
The woman on the bed has jellybean hair.
Indeed, without an oathwhich, bewept on a cheap duvet, gives me superfluous death, O how the wheel becomes it. Got that, studio? Got that? Thought and afflictions, hell itself? Heel, then, head over?
I was speaking of the dream, digress reminisce, and of the Woman in White, as she inhabits that dreamtime, when it comes to me again and again and again. The woman on the bed, she’ll wait, I am sure. Not goin’ nowhere. And, remember, I am not cum for her. The hostess here in 707 passes me a beer, though in the dream my throat and mouth go parched. But, no, yes, in her chair, chain-smoking, there is the WiW, who is no older, they say, than that day on Deer Isle—you believe that part, and if you credit a sliver might as well credit the lot for a penny, for a pound. Her face stops clocks, as they say, her heart going tick - tock - tick - tock - tick - tock - tick-tock, and she stops me, too, with that beauty. She actually is talking about tranporteichon, and I tells her I takes the bus. I likes the bus. Gives a fucker time to think. Then she returns to talk of assembly programs, authoring systems, naked-eye constellations, transistors, protoplanetary party-time. I turn away from the mirror, and she smiles, oh god does she smile for me. Eyes as blue as Howlin’ Wolf. She sees my reaction and offers me a couple of slickers, a bebop, and one of her contraband Czech cigs. I accept the first, and I accept the latter. I dry swallow and ask her for a light.
“That’s a neat trick,” I say.
She shrugs.
“Mr. Carlisle, what was it you wished to discuss?” she asks.
Wait. What? Dreaming, that’s my inline thought, because I have shit-all recollection of desiring to talk about anything at all.
She smiles again (unless it’s that still same smile from before), says, “Je suis sérieuse et j’écoute attentivement.”
I almost remark how I dream French better than I speak or understand it.
“True you’re Queen Bee?” I ask.
Again with the thwarting shrug.
“In Cleveland, I heard the tape,” I tell her, and awake I will admit that’s a lie. They keep it wrapped, the buggers, and I’ve only laid my ears upon the thirdhand whisper dubs, iymk.
One of the crows does as good as that woman on the 707 bed and nosedives into the sheet glass behind me. Pow. I jump, but the WiW does not so much as flinch. Like they tell, ice water in her veins. She’s chili swag, Arthur.
“Do you play?” she wants to know.
“Chess?”
“Chess,” says she to me. “Of course, chess.”
“No.”
On the bed in 707, meanwhile back in the now awake, achy-achy shake-and-bake, I do believe the suicide is bracing for the first cut. I hold to and appreciate this timeworn tatterdemalion ceremony, more than the more fatter of mac routes to death. Those make shit telly, someone drinks drain cleaner or takes a load of pills. And guns are just lazy. Oh, but this once, up in Beantown, I filmed one of these soirees whence a girl swallowed liquid nitrogen. You shoulda seen that one. The ratings went to the moon, three times around, before the referees in legal found a microscopic wrinkle in her contract and shut down the feed.
In her chair by the ATL room’s only and one lamp, the alabaster Queen Bee shuts her eyes a moment. I know well enough she’s jetlagged. I know that, dreaming the way we dost tumble to things not would we know not dreaming. I try not to stare at the tip-jab-coddles all down her left arm. In the dream, she’s on the needle, but down in Atlanta, who isn’t, yeah? No? Though, she ain’t from Atlanta, just passing through, and just passing through, apparently, because I wanted to talk with her.
She opens her eyes, and then another bird hits the window.
“Last month, was that you on the waves? Or wa
s that your sister?”
Rumor has it about the sister, though R&D swears sis is still more mythic than the WiW herself. But I cover the war, and that makes gold of rumor and only copper or antique green paper of whatever the nerdulent crowd back in the tower have to say. The producers understand that, sometimes.
“Je ne suis pas venue ici pour discuter ma soeur.”
Oh, so she’s feeding me run-through Franco now, so possibly she believes I chat only that low gutter punch. I’m not insulted, just . . . ya know.
“You’ve never discussed her with anyone,” I say, immediately wishing I’d not.
“You’re not even watching her,” someone says through my ear. “What do you think we’re paying you for, Mr. Carlisle? The bed, Carlisle. Keep your eyes on the damn bed.”
“Fuck you,” I mutter, ’cause they peg a mutter as clearly as a shout, but I dutifully redirect my head to the woman on the bed and her shiny knife. She must not have had enough preparatory sedation, because the lady’s looking scaredy.
Dapper scar, indeed.
7.: The Way Out Is Through
(Stonington, Maine, 9/30/2012)
It was almost an hour past dark by the time we made it back to the attic. I can only be sure of the transition by recourse to my watch. In its current condition, the sky is hardly a help. So late in the day, we shouldn’t have been that far from the attic, not so far as the docks at the end of Seabreeze Avenue. But we needed food. I’m sick as a sick dog today. The pain has been a hammer pounding my entire body, glass and razors in my joints and lungs and belly, but I didn’t dare fix until we got back here to sanctuary. The dope is as good as any toxin out there in the turmoil at the end of the world, which is to say it will get you killed. Sixty-Six hates when I call this that, the End of the World. She never says so, but she makes the face she makes whenever she disapproves of something I’ve said. I think of it as her Disapproving Face. Anyway, I fixed almost an hour ago, and now there’s only the music of Hell seeping in through the walls and the open window. Never mind the season; tonight it is too warm to shut the window. Still, despite the heat, Sixty-Six keeps her hoodie on. I’ve stripped down to my bra and panties, and I’m still sweating. Drips of me, of my internal ocean, splashing against the dusty floor as I write this. My ocean is clear, though, not the sloshing putrescence of the bay, of all the sea surrounding Deer Isle. We found a tidy cache of food in the harbormaster’s office—cans of meat and vegetables, mostly. We filled our packs, and it should keep us fed a week, at least. If we live another week. Sixty-Six seems indifferent to survival, and, at times, fuck but I wish I were, too. Then there would only be the monotonous rhythm of pain and the freedom from pain the dope brings, the heroin’s euphoria, our days on the street hunting down the demons (I do not mean this word in any conventional sense; no other seems to fit, that’s all), gunfire, the hilt of my holy khukuri in my hand, slashing the air, slashing flesh that isn’t flesh. Matter, protoplasm, Urschleim, but not flesh. The stink of ozone when I have no choice but to resort to those intangible weapons folded up inside me. The howling, capering abominations. But we’re home again, “home” again. Me and taciturn Sixty-Six. There’s a crooked stack of books beside her mattress. She reads. She reads as much as I did, before. We found the public library our first week here, not long after we found each other, and it was one of the few instances when she’s seemed happy. She used a shopping cart to haul away dozens of books. Now, I think they keep her company much more than I do. They are her solace. I want to talk about what we saw down there this afternoon, how we found ourselves hemmed in and almost did not make it back. But that is the one subject I can rest assured Sixty-Six will never discuss: whatever’s happening here. The sea is the color of semen. The sea is the consistency of jizz. The scrotum-tightening sea. It smells like sewage. It steams and disgorges demons. “Demons,” with scare quotes. All but shapeless shapes that burst when shot or cut, their constituent molecules thereafter slithering back into the semen sea to reassemble and gather themselves for a new assault. Sixty-Six calls them shoggoths, a word she’s taken from old horror stories, turns out. I don’t care what the fuck they are. They pop and slither off. There’s a pretty picture drawn nice as nice can be, isn’t it, Bête? I spend my days hoping you are safe, that they are doing you no harm. I spend my days in slaughter, in a charade meant to convince the few survivors in Stonington that we have their irrelevant interests at stake. That we are more than two lost souls, refugees ourselves, sent here to topple the dominoes just so, perpetuating calculated chaos, perhaps for no other reason than because curious men and women desire to see the pretty fractals that will follow from our efforts. Last night, Sixty-Six was reading The House at Pooh Corner, and since she doesn’t seem to mind my talking while she reads (so long as I don’t expect replies), I rattled on for a while about Tuscaloosa and mine and your time at the university. Oh, she did find it odd that we chose to go to school in Alabama, when she knows (I do not know how) that we might have had our pick of the Ivy Leagues. Anyway, yes, I talked about fossils—how we were the first to find the blastoid Granatocrinus granulatus in the Fort Payne Chert; how, as undergraduates, we named Selmasaurus russelli, a new genus and species of plioplatecarpine mosasaur; the papers we delivered together on mosasaur biostratigraphy at annual meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (Ottawa, Austin, Cleveland, then Bristol and our first trip to England); taking part in the dig that produced the tyrannosauroid Appalachiosaurus, our small role in some of the preliminary examination of the skeleton while it was still in the matrix and plaster field jackets; the mess with FHSM VP-13910, how we prepared it and first saw it for what it was, a second specimen of Selmasaurus, but the credit going to others and all our work and insight left unacknowledged; collecting Oligocene fossils in the White River Badlands of Nebraska; standing in the wooded gully at Haddonfield, New Jersey, where, in 1858, the first American dinosaur known from more than a few scraps was discovered; how we were the first to happen upon and describe the remains of a velociraptorine theropod from the Gulf Coast (even if it was only a single, tiny tooth). I went on and on like that—Ditomopyge, Carboniferous chondrichthyans, Globidens alabamaensis, the Pierre Shale at Red Bird and Pottsville Formation at Morris, that skull of Megalonyx jeffersonii we prepared but were afraid we’d screw up and so didn’t finish (one of many failures, I admitted), freezing strip mines in the winter and blistering quarries and chalk washes in July . . . and on and on and on. She heard, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t listen to a word of it. She is a master of compartmentalization. Anyhow, I don’t care what William Faulkner said, Bête. I think the past is the past, for us, and we can recall those days, but we’ll never go back to that life we cherished. Will we. No. Science and reason are being demolished around me. Paradigms are being reduced to matchsticks, to splinters. Incommensurable topsy-turvy. I hope you are safe, sister, and that they are keeping their promises. I’m doing everything I’m told. To the letter. I am obedient. But that’s always come easily to me. Not like you, sweet Bête. But I know even if I do not die here, if we ever are reunited, there is no going back. Now, returning to the matter of the Semen Sea, here is what we think we know, pieced together from hearsay, frightened confessions, newspaper and other local periodical accounts printed in the weeks before it began (Commercial Fisheries News, Compass Classifieds, The Deer Isle Chronicle, Island Ad-Vantages, et al.) from captains’ logs we’ve recovered off derelict fishing boats: On the night of August 20, a chartreuse light fell screaming from the sky. It is agreed the light did scream, or whatever cast the light screamed, as it fell into the bay somewhere beyond Burnt Cove. But the sun and the stars were still visible until the twenty-seventh, when the visibility zero-zero began rolling in from the east, so not from the direction of Burnt Cove. Empty boats, dead fishermen found floating or washed up to make a feast for crabs and gulls and maggots. The greasy rains and the sickness that came after them, the plague that killed more than 78 percent of Deer Isle’s population before we arr
ived, the whatever-it-was the CDC couldn’t even slow down before it claimed most of their team, too. The stars coming back . . . wrong; unrecognizable, alien constellations spinning overhead. Yes, I do sound like a madwoman, and I don’t expect any of this will ever be made public. If it is contained, if it ever ends—The Event—they’ll be sure no one talks, I think, even if it means murdering everyone who survives. There will be a mock-rational explanation. Mock science everyone will want to believe, because believing the truth—even were it not concealed—would be intolerable. But enough for now. Sixty-Six has dog-eared a page and put her book away. She wants me to turn off the Coleman lantern. I need the sleep. Tomorrow will be at least as bad as today, as bad as yesterday, as bad as day after tomorrow. Or worse. Night, sister. Sweet dreams.
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