Black Helicopters

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  13.: Late Saturday Night Motel Signal

  (Atlanta/Manhattan, 8/9/2035) [Part 2]

  I think, here and there in 707, I’ll do this one double pay, cadge the network and the blippers. Oh, sure, the net will scream, but I do this best of all, they know that, best of anyone, and the swells won’t dare kick me.

  Now, ful brighter was the shynyng of hir hewe, imo, the Woman in White, Queen Bee, Queen of Diamond-Hard Dicks, Bells, and Whistles. I cannot look away, she’s gone so supernova. She stubs out her cigarette in one of those faux rhino-horn ashtrays you find at the duty-free cabooses. This ashtray is a hideous shade of yellow. Details, boys, it’s all the devil right in there. Check your style manuals. Check your sixes and check your weapons at the door, natch. I take a long drag on my own smoke and tap ash onto the polished ceramic at my feet.

  “We dislike journalists,” she says. “If you’d done your homework, you’d know that. We dislike dreamers even more.”

  When the nuke went off in St. Petersburg, they say that she was there. Sara White Queen, White Queen Black, that is what they say. Though, the two times I formal interviewed her not dozing she neither confirmed nor did she deny. She collects sleepsy sea shells by the seashore. Did I mention that already? No, yes? Scrollback. But she does. Corks them up, they say, and I dare say she took no few of my own in the twenty-fours we spent one in the other’s company. This dream, it’s not the day we met. Not at all. I say I spent time in Atlanta, but not with her.

  When the tsunami stomped the shivers on Seymour Island, they say she was there, too, swimming with the melting bergs, penguins, and what you’ll have.

  She’s a bad penny, this one.

  No one has ever believed I spent waking time in her company. The blippers won’t even buy that for fact, and they snap up the bat boys and Buddhas in bagels. But. Already in progress, the reverie of a night come and gone, ill met by moonlight. Times down at hoof I could sure have used a cheque, but no one will touch, and that makes me wonder how long her arm actually is, right? If we are all only the saddish puppets she spoke of, for true, and she the puppeteer. I wouldn’t put it past, the way no one will finger on my reminiscences of the truth. But here I’ve done a damn double digression, and neither the suicide nor the dream of Her are on the stage of these words. It’s the headache. It usually is, the buggity hurtin’ slinging John Henry in my own personal calaveras de azúcar. Too many hours logged on the scorch, says the docs the network pays for me to see. Should retire, the docs agree, but not like they’re gonna pay the rent, and not as if I have any other marketables. Not about to lay down and take that bodhisattva vow, go Romeo clean. But docs are covering their own wars, sure, and so I don’t begrudge.

  On the bed, the suicide kisses her blade, puts narrow painted lips to steel. The suits back in the tower are getting annoyed her intestines are still on the proper-born side of her skin. But no one in 707 speaks up to hurry her along, as we all in the know sick to the anticipation. Once it’s only the what’s done is done, show’s over, curtain falls, die Geschichte ist aus und hier lauft eine Maus, so drink up, fuckos, until the next kamikaze puputan rolls round and you’re lucky to be on the guest list.

  “Focus,” says my bosses.

  “Focus,” says my memory of WiW.

  “I miss you,” I say to her, and she laughs.

  “You knew from the start,” she replies, pull no punch. “There was never any deceit, unless it was you lying to yourself.”

  She cannot stay in one place that long, for her and thee to last out. Then again, the rumors say she don’t gotta, the rumors what say she has a twin white shadow. Ivoire and Bête, but I never asked her for the up and up on that word of mouth. Didn’t dare, except in the dreams. Only halfsome fool, me. Ask around, you’ll hear.

  “I know,” I say, and she sighs. “Sorry,” adds I.

  She might two have sighed when the Cat 5 typhoon smucked the fuck down Manila way. She might have sighed, I have thought, all the way before to Hiroshima and Katrina, Peshtigo and Tunguska.

  “Why don’t you shut up and come to bed,” she says (not a qyest).

  Isn’t that why I’ve asked her here, and a fraction of my lonely in her absence?

  I never recall her getting naked or blow-by-blow from chair to bed, but sure it hardly matters. She’s there, bedded, flesh as to marble dusted.

  “Yes,” I reply. “I’m coming.”

  But I turn back to face the glass and the city all spread banquet below the whichever skyward floor we’re briefly inhabiting. There are two bird-shaped smears printed on the glass, blood and shit and feathers. Crash, delete. She says I shouldn’t look at those, and I know how right she is. But I worry them, regardless, knowing of a certain they are critical integers of the riddle of She.

  Nonetheless, don’t know, paper toe.

  She is a surprisingly gentle lover. In dream, I mean, but, then she was, too, for reals.

  Blister white here, though in 707 a bead of the αἷμα swells holly-berry gleam on our suicide-to-be’s mouth after a first unexpected slice, not qyest inadvertent. She licks it away, but has earned from the pit a grateful ah - now - all - sit - up - take - notice sigh. Set aside your idle conversation. Her second, she’ll have to take up sword should prime de dibujo etc., turn McNuggets on the talismonger assembled, so obviously a second has interest vested in keeping the show must go on. She leans to an ear and whispers. Can’t hear, but I can imagine, can’t I? Could be, Make it quick. Contrawise, could be, With mercy for the greedy, dear, for rats live on no evil star. I likes, tho, Don’t you fucking make me do it for you.

  “Carlisle, can you please get a close up?” asks impatient’d, long-suffering producer. I feel the techs scrambling behind my retina. I tab their close-up, sticking to roughshod p’s and q’s and dot my eyes.

  “You got it, you jackal shits,” says I. I blink and pull in. It’s a good smart shot, if I do concede, and it’ll be turning up in the verts and broadsides for months. So close are the second and her Duke of Welly, they might be exchanging sweet nothings. That’ll get the viewers at home and in the izakaya and sports bars and bear gardens with wet panties, all right.

  All right.

  I think the woman with the jellybean hair might be crying, for no added charge.

  “You getting all this, Carlisle?”

  I am.

  In my Deep South Peachtree dream, the Queen Bee holds me. She smells of tobacco, vanilla, sweat, and semen. We are spent, the both. She does not love me, as there is just one love in her, and she dare not speak its name, so all I have is second-guess work. But the fucks were all good, alike to the dream.

  Now trewly, how sore that me smarte ashen dede and colde.

  I would live down the vieux rêve forever. I’m that pathetic.

  And finally like 707 She Here To See does as promised the johnny comes, and before she loses her nerve straight in dives the tantō! Huzzah and hallelujah!

  The sponsors will be not complaining, no, and the net will be happy-happy, and here’s your pound of flesh, you at home (or wheresomever). And, important most the all, I get paid my commish. Huzzah! Homerun! Into the belly, then cutting traditional left to right, ah, you see? I always am put to mind by the entrails of pink-blue deep-sea worms, fat on rotten abyssal carrion. Ever see a clip of hagfish at a down-below whale fall? Still-living intestines in my view, they seem to writhe like that. The room gasps a collective gasp, as traditional as the dictates of this perverted seppuku. I’m right there, covering the war, and in the hollow dogging the shoes of that gasp is when I spot her, Her, Woman in White and Of White and Queen-Be Ivory Beast. Sara Never Was Her Name, but one amongst a hundred. Here’s rumor made manifest, my Johnny comes.

  “Woolgathering?” in ATL asks me.

  At the Chinatown present-day, I have dared divert my attention from the bed, in danger of scotching the grande eloquent hacer un exit, which could or shall cost me of a certain a percentage. But I feel as of old her eyes on me, in that aftergasp, which is
how not could I fucking look? Right? Yes, no? Yes, kanga and yes, more roo. This will pass so fastly, as did that sword through the woman’s innards, as always passes climax, orgasm, all fine pinnacle gained. This will pass like a bolt from the blue. We’ll not speak. I would not hazard to go half that distance. Chillsome bumples on my arms and legs and hairs up on the back of my neck, since—rumors and my true intent aside—what the motherfucking Christ is she doing here? Has she come for me or only for the gladiatorial entertainments? Has she come back to stay? It’s a domino toppling towards the next in line, no doubt, and this is why, sure, there’s more fear in me than deelite at the sight of her.

  “Just thinking,” I reply.

  “Only just thinking?”

  “The crows,” I say, then roll off her and nod towards the window and the bird-shaped stains. “Are they here for you? Or only because of you?”

  For, even asleep, I do not believe in coincidentals.

  “You should rest,” she shushes.

  The woman on the bed in 707 slumps forward, though not yet dead, still short of bag and tag, and the crowd goes wild. Her second kisses her cheek. See thee off to an honorable end, for they speak of honor in the fulfillment of one’s Art, and if this is not art I don’t know what would be. Crimson pigment splashed upon the canvas of the real.

  I am able not to hear the angry from the tower, good at my bithead’s lookaway when I gotta be, when I’ve blown code but good and the coyote’s get forlorn, for live paid extra for an under the counter, backroom, and costing didn’t approve it cut-out chip.

  From my dream, says the WiW, Sara White Queen, “Oh, why so green and lonely? Little lamb, smile.” Which she does for me, not answering on the issue of corvid sacrificials.

  But waking, this night, 707, she does not even approach me. And I respect that, however might it make my soul crumple. We’ve an agreement. “Carlisle, you stupid son of a bitch. The bed. Look at the goddamn bed.”

  Yeah, this night’s gonna have twice-over paydata fat cat credulous scores, and also is it now occurring to me what the alleys will pony for a glimpse who might be her. Oh, it’ll rake some nuyen I can stash for drizzle days. But I cover the war, my cover story, and so I do return my focus to death unfolding on the bed.

  In the dream, crows hover, and . . .

  “What’ll I do, when you are far away, and I am blue, what’ll I do?”

  She shushes me. “Here is the day,” says she.

  Good nite.

  14.: 折り紙設計/Hasenohr Faltung

  (Dublin Port, 16/10/2012)

  From the passenger-side seat of the rented Nissan, Bête stares up at the cold Irish sky, at the low, moldy scum of clouds pressing down on the world, and she says to Doc Twisby, she says, “A slow sort of country. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” And Doc Twisby asks her why she’s quoting the Red Queen, and the albino twin fingers the shiny black ammonite she wears on a chain about her throat and says, “That tree back there,” not bothering to explain which tree, “we’ve passed it several times already.” Doc Twisby in the driver’s seat, she assures Bête that it almost certainly isn’t the same tree—after all, they’ve likely passed hundreds of trees since they got on the great asphalt crescent of the M50 at Palmerstown, headed north and then east, headed for the docks and a ferry out of Ireland. Repeatedly, she’s told the twin how they got lucky at the fruit and vegetable market the day before, but luck being what it is, they shouldn’t expect to get lucky again. Bête is folding thin sheets of crimson and green and lavender washi from an origami shop on Camden Street, folding paper cranes. Since she began just after dinner the night before, she’s folded a whole boxful, but one can never be too cautious. “Step three,” she says aloud, “fold the triangle in half by taking the left corner and folding it to the right. Step four, take the top flap and open it, then crease both the right and left sides so that you can fold the top corner to the bottom corner.” Twisby, she says, “Dear, you probably have enough by now,” but Bête shakes her head, and Twisby, she doesn’t argue. She’s learned to trust the twin’s intuition in these, and most other, matters. They pass blue exit signs printed in English and in Irish, and they pass other drivers and freight trucks and delivery vans, and Doc Twisby assures Bête that the turnoff for the ferry isn’t much farther, and Bête, she assures the doc that they’ve just passed that same tree again. “You’re sure?” asks Doc Twisby, and the twin, she speaks in the raspy voice she always uses when she’s quoting the Red Queen, “That’s right, though, when you say ‘garden’—I’ve seen gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness.” Doc Twisby nods and keeps her eyes on the road. When they reach France, she can try to sort out whatever it is that’s happening to the twin’s psyche, whatever began when Bête folded an assassin that Albany had sent to murder them both—dissociative fugue, depersonalization, transient schizoaffective disorder, what the fuck ever it is that’s been shaken loose or turned wrong way around inside her head. These things are to be expected. These things were always inevitable. She is treading ground never trod before. “We’re being watched, you know,” says the twin, “we’re being followed.” And Twisby says, “Yes, love, but not by a tree, we’re not.” And Bête tells her, “She’ll kill us, if she ever finds us.” Doc Twisby asks, “Who? Who will kill us?” Bête, she says, “Step fourteen, take the right flap and fold it over to the left—in this instance, the left being north. Take the right flap and fold it north. I mean the Egyptian, le Juif errant, Jerusalemin suutari.” They’re coming up on the entrance to the Dublin Tunnel, and traffic has slowed to a crawl. “She’s not going to find us,” says Doc Twisby, and the twin counters, “And Jesus said, ‘I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day.’” Doc Twisby scowls and says, “Don’t make her into more than she is. She’s only a woman, no matter how much nonsense and mystique and no matter how many tall tales Barbican wraps round her.” The twin folds her crane, and she glances at the windshield, and she glances up at the low, moldy sky above the windshield, and in her Red Queen voice she says, “You say that, love, but we run like rabbits, and you may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like, but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary. Call it nonsense, and I will call us rabbits, and all the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you.” But first they must catch you, thinks Doc Twisby, and she checks the clock on the dashboard and worries about missing their boat. “I’m not even certain that she’s Egyptian,” says Bête, speaking in her own voice, beast twin, white shadow, pale fugitive. “Though she’s thought of herself as Egyptian so long now that I doubt she remembers the truth of it. She may be Persian. She may be Ethiopian. She may be the Queen of Sheba herself.” Bête pauses, then adds, “Nigra sum, sed formosa,” and crosses herself, and then she recites steps nineteen through twenty-one. “Now,” she says, “step twenty-two: bend the wings downward at a ninety-degree angle, and you’ve finished a splendid origami crane.” Doc Twisby, she asks how many that makes now, and the twin looks at the old shoebox of paper cranes in the back seat and replies, two hundred and ten. “So, just a few more then?” asks the doc, and the twin nods her head, yes, just a few more. The traffic is moving again, and before long the tunnel swallows them down its long concrete gullet, and now there’s no looming, conspiratorial sky to bear witness against them. No grey October sky to press them beneath its thumb. And no lurking, recurring trees. Bête wishes they could stop here. She wishes they could be like proper rabbits, like any good child of El-ahrairah and hunker down in the darkness broken only by the glaring LCD lights mounted on the tunnel ceiling, that they could dig in and wait until the wolves and the stoats and the hungry hunting birds with hooked claws and hooked beaks have all gone away. They could wait here, she thinks, until the Egyptian loses interest, until the storm blows over and her dying, divide
d sister finishes fighting monsters in Maine, until poor, brave Ivoire isn’t dying anymore, until Ivoire crosses the sea on triumphant white wings and finds them waiting in the gloom. Bête presses her face to the window and watches the whitewashed cement walls rushing past. “Quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness,” she says. “The only evil is waste.” These words rattle off her tongue like rosary beads pinched between pious Catholic fingers. She shuts her eyes for a moment, only to find Nora Swann waiting there for her. The assassin dutifully shoots herself, and Bête opens her eyes again and stares at the white tunnel wall. “You’ll like the ferry, I think,” Doc Twisby tells her. “Will I?” asks the Red Queen, speaking from the lips of the twin. “Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle your fingers all the time. Why will I like the boat?” And so Doc Twisby tells her, “It’s called the MS Oscar Wilde, and it will carry us to Cherbourg. It has a movie theater and restaurants and a perfume shop. It even has a beauty salon.” Everything I’m saying is beginning to sound absurd, Doc Twisby thinks to herself. Lewis Carroll would be amused. Situation and anxiety is rendering her every word in shades of nonsense. “It has a maximum capacity of 1,458 passengers,” says Bête. “Any one of them might be an operative, a butcher for Albany or a butcher for Y or even one of your own who has decided they don’t like the way you’re playing the game.” Doc Twisby gives her a look, gives the twin such a look it would do murder if looks worked that way, and then the psychiatrist, she says, “That, my dear, is why you’re folding cranes. Now, you should stop staring out the window and get back to it.” She doesn’t ask the girl how it is she knows how many passengers the ferry can hold. She’s learned enough to know there’s no use in asking questions. But Bête, she’s thinking how maybe this tunnel runs on and on forever, and how, if maybe it does, they won’t ever need all those cranes, after all. How maybe they can just keep going until the Nissan finally runs out of gas, and then what? The horse is dead. From here we walk, she thinks. And then she says it aloud. “What?” asks Doc Twisby, and in the tale unfolding behind the twin’s eyes, the Red Queen says (and so says Bête), “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth. How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think.” Doc Twisby, sitting there behind the wheel, one wary eye on the road ahead and one warier eye on the twin, she answers, “I think perhaps you’ve got the story mixed up again, love. Mind your page numbers. Mind the volumes.” But Bête, she says, “I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” as if the psychiatrist hasn’t spoken a word. And then she turns her face away from the window, away from the tunnel wall rushing past outside, and Twisby feels herself being peered into, and she knows this is what it felt like to be Nora Swann. And she thinks what Victor Frankenstein must have thought, staring into the eyes of his creature, and she expects the girl to open her mouth and say (for example), “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” Instead, Bête says, “We don’t have to take the ferry. We don’t have to swim the ocean. We don’t have to fight the tide. We could stop right here, like all the people of El-ahrairah, and we could wait for Ivy to find us. We could be cunning and dig deep. Who’d think to look for us here?” And in this moment, and not for the first time, Doc Twisby, she sees her possible doom and the possible doom of many other things besides crouched here behind the impenetrable blue eyes of the twin. Victor Frankenstein, she thinks. Yes, but also Oppenheimer and also Marie Curie and Einstein and a thousand other well-meaning fools who reached for the stars and lived to wish they’d not been half so ambitious, half so curious, half so clever and willing to trespass on the domain of a thousand different deities, who were always fools themselves. “You flatter yourself,” Bête tells her, and the psychiatrist can almost feel the way the twin is rummaging around inside her head, squeezing in between left and right hemispheres, insinuating herself into cortical folds, between the grey matter topography of gyri and sulci. In the gloom beneath the earth, Doc Twisby sees or only imagines that she sees the predatory glint of red-gold eyeshine boring into her brain and into her soul, but there’s no mistaking the twin’s sudden mood swing, and there’s no mistaking the desire to do harm crouched between the angry words of her experiment. Bête says, “What we have done to Ivy, we deserve to die for that, you and I both. But you most of all. You deserve to die a thousand times over, for what you’ve done to her, for sending her away to fight a Jabberwocky with only that lunatic Sixty-Six at her side. Never mind the disease and the dope, you have not even warned her, have you? But I could stop it now. You don’t think that I know that, but I do. I could stop it all, right this very second, couldn’t I?” And Doc Twisby, not quite managing to hide the tremble in her voice, she says, “We’re almost out of the tunnel, love. We’re almost to the boat. And remember, quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness, and the only sin in all the world is waste. We stop now, and it’s all been a waste, it’s all been for nothing, all of Ivoire’s pain and all your fear and sorrow and all of our running.” But turbulent, seditious Bête, she says how maybe she doesn’t care anymore. How maybe she’s perfectly happy being a sinner in the hands of an angry god, if that means she can only put her arms about her sister again, and if that means she never has to have a gun aimed at her head again, and if it means, also, that she never again has to force an assassin to turn that gun on herself. “Don’t you think I know we’re all but off the reservation now?” asks Bête of Doc Twisby. “Don’t you think I know you’re flying blind, pretty much making it up as you go along, because maybe you’re afraid Julia Set’s about to cut her losses and pull the plug on your little horror show? Maybe it wasn’t Albany that sent Nora Swann. Maybe it was the dogs who hold your chain.” Now there’s a bright pinpoint of pain behind Doc Twisby’s eyes, and she knows that in another few seconds, or less, the twin could fold, just the same as she’s been folding all those many pretty orizuru against their ruin. For Bête, it would be almost the easiest thing in the world. So, with nothing left to lose, Doc Twisby screws up a mad scientist’s bottomless gall and audacity, and she quotes from a book she’s read the twin twice over now, a book she’s sewn through and through with suggestion and post-hypnotic contingency: “Tearing the paper means you’ve stopped believing in the infinite possibilities of a square,” she says, hardly louder than a whisper. And—just for a few seconds more—Bête glares defiantly back at her like a caged and tortured tiger, like a wild and hurting thing ready to break free and be done with its captivity—but then, then the rebellion is quashed and all the fight drains out of her and here again is only half a will, only a half portion of resolve, only sweet, compliant Bête who wants nothing but to get all those paper cranes folded, just in case another wolf comes knock, knock, knocking at the door. And the car exits the tunnel into dim, clouded day that seems, by comparison, almost bright as the surface of the sun, and Doc Twisby is ashamed at her relief and ashamed, too, at the way her hands are shaking when she pays her €3 at the tollbooth. She passes the receipt to Bête, and the twin makes of it another crane. “You’ll like the ferry,” says Doc Twisby to her little white lab rat. “You’ll like Paris. I’ll take you to the natural history museum on the rue Cuvier, and you can see the dinosaurs there. You can tell me all about them.” And Bête, she asks, “Do you think that would be safe? Don’t you think that’s just the sort of place they’ll be looking for us?” And Doc Twisby pretends to smile a wise and knowing smile, and she tells the twin, “We shall see, little beastie. We shall see.”