All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  “I want to see him,” I say. “You have to let me see him.” I push past him. I’m in a hallway, like I thought. Not so much worse than some of the clubs I’ve been in. I stumble down the hall, past closed doors, a reeking horror that is maybe a bathroom, and then I see it: a door that’s open a crack. I walk through it without knocking. Jack is there, his back to me. His shoulders are slumped, but he’s standing.

  “Jack.” He whirls around. His face when he sees me is equal parts horror and, I am delighted to see, joy.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, but I’m already running at him, flinging myself into his arms. He grunts, startled, but holds me tight. “You crazy thing,” he says. “You crazy, crazy thing. You should never have come here.”

  “I missed you,” I say, “so much. I missed you so much.”

  “I missed you, too,” he says, and then he kisses me. Out of all the kisses, ever, it is the best one. A kiss that is sorry and I love you, get me out of here and forgive me. A kiss that is the two of us driving west, getting free of here, going all the way to where the ocean meets the sky. A kiss that is all the time before any of this happened, that brief window of joy when we were just two people holding hands in a starlit park. A kiss like Jack’s music. Finally we break apart, gasping. I can hardly breathe.

  “Come home with me,” I manage. “I came for you.”

  “Sweet thing.” His eyes are so sad.

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you mean it. I can’t.”

  “I was wrong. What I said to you when you left. I didn’t get it.”

  “I know.”

  “But I get it now. And you did what you wanted. And now you can come home.”

  “Look at me,” he says gently, and I look at him. That face. So beautiful, so tired. He looks years older than he did the last time I saw him. “I can’t go home. That’s not how it works. I came here to do this. I have to see it through.”

  “He’ll kill you.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

  “Jack.”

  “This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he says. “Not being famous. I don’t care about being famous. That’s where Aurora’s dad and I are different. That’s what killed him. He thought he wanted it, and then he got it, and he didn’t realize until it was too late that no one wants that, not really. But me—do you have any idea what it’s like to play for them?”

  “I saw you. I saw your face on that stage.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy.”

  “But I came to get you.”

  “You didn’t come for me,” he says. “Look me in the face and tell me you came for me.”

  “I did—” I begin, and then I stop. He’s right. He’s been right, this whole time.

  “This is what I want,” he says. “Let me go. Find her. She needs you.”

  “I love you,” I say, and this time I say it loud, so he can hear. So he knows. All the best artists are selfish. He smiles, tilts my chin up. Kisses me again, a kiss that is softer, sadder. Goodbye.

  “I love you, too.” He reaches into his pocket. “Take this.” He hands me his knife. “You’ll need it, where you’re going.”

  “But—”

  “Take it.”

  “I’ll give it back. Someday.” Someday soon, I think, but I know better.

  He looks at me. Dark eyes, dark hair, the pulse at his throat, the smell of his skin. The worn fabric of his shirt, his scuffed boots. Pebbles beneath me, the sound of waves. Wind in my hair. His hand in my hand. Ink on skin. The taste of peaches. The Fool. The Lovers. Death. I touch his wrist, his hip, underneath his shirt to feel the heat of his skin and the line of muscle there. Memorizing. I will never love anyone like this again. Hold the thought in my palm like a stone. Let it fall. He takes my hand from his waist, brings my knuckles to his mouth. Closes his eyes. We stand like that for a moment, and then he releases me.

  “Tell me you are choosing this,” I say. Tell me you are choosing this over me.

  “I am choosing this. I chose this a long time ago.”

  I can’t look at Jack anymore or I will fall apart. Minos waits behind us, watching.

  “Minos,” I say. “I want to see Aurora.”

  When he speaks at last his voice is in my head and not in the world, a voice as old and dry as dust. You do not know what you are asking for, child.

  “Try me,” I say. I look at Jack one last time. Drinking him in.

  “I love you,” he says again. “Now go.”

  I turn away from him and follow Minos into the dark.

  There is no time in hell. We walk for what could be hours or days. It’s still too hot, but the noise dies down and I’m alone with Minos and my own breath, the crunch of my footsteps on what I think is stone. We are in some kind of tunnel, heading down. The angle of the floor is steep enough in places to nearly trip me up. There is no light of any kind. Minos is as silent as always, but something has changed, in the dark, between the two of us.

  “Tell me who you are,” I say after we have been walking for a long time. “I know there’s someone there. Tell me who you are.”

  I was a king. In a different time. Now I am a gatekeeper.

  “You collect people.”

  I collect beautiful things.

  “For who?”

  The nights are long, here. We’re still walking. We’ll be walking forever, I think, down and down and down. We’ll be walking still when the world ends and the stars crash into the earth and the moon spins off through an empty sky. I think I am tired, I think I am tired beyond tired, but if I stop moving I won’t start again, so I put one foot after the other, following him down. My throat is dry, sweat a salt crust on my skin. There’s a blister puffing up on one heel. I lick cracked lips, cough, keep walking. If he thinks this is enough of a test, he has never met the likes of me before. I won’t ask him how long it takes to get there. I will not let the terror of the dark get hold of me. If this is a test, I will fucking pass it. I will pass any test this creepy skeleton in a crappy suit can give me. Let them turn me into stone or water or flowers. I came here for my lover and the girl who is my sister, and they were mine before anyone else tried to take them from me, before this bony motherfucker showed up on my stoop and let loose all the old things better left at rest. Jack I will let go; Jack is on his own, now. But I will die before I leave Aurora down here. Take your bacchanal, take your bloody-limbed girls, take your witches and your three-headed dog, and leave me and my love alone. Down, down, down, and further down. Every story I’ve ever heard about Minos’s kind coming to life in my head. Persephone trapped in the underworld, Andromeda strapped to a rock. Medusa with her snaky head. The fates, the harpies. Arachne cursed into a spider’s body, forever spinning because she loved herself too well.

  Why are you here? Why here, of all places, this city, this time? I wonder.

  We are everywhere. The voice in my head is his. I didn’t know he could hear me, could see inside.

  “All I want is what’s mine.” My tongue is so dry I can hardly shape the words.

  What belongs to you is not for you to decide, child.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s what you think, asshole.”

  Far greater heroes than you have come under the earth and not returned.

  “I’m not a hero,” I say. “I’m a bitch.”

  And then I can feel it: The air is changing. We’re coming out of the tunnel into the forest of bone trees. I know where we are. I’ve been here every night for months. The river is ahead. I can hear the dog howling. Bare white trees, thorny vines. Things moving between the branches. We do not walk long before the trees stop, the line of the wood’s edge as sharp as if it has been cleaved away. We walk through the white trunks until we reach the place where they end and the river is in front of us. Minos stops.

  If you cross this river, you will not return.

  “People have.”

  Once. In all the history of time.

  “I’ll chance it.” Shrug.
I want to cut off his arm and feed it to him. I follow him to the edge of the water and stop. The far bank is shrouded in darkness. He motions with one bony hand and a boat glides out of the darkness toward us, cowl-draped ferryman at the helm. There’s no way out but through. Minos steps into the boat, surprisingly graceful for someone so tall, and offers me his hand. I laugh out loud, take it. Hold tight. Take the first step. The second. The boat doesn’t rock. I’m in. I know you’re supposed to pay the ferryman but I don’t have any gold coins. I find Cass’s crystal in my pocket, hand it over. The ferryman takes it, pale hand gleaming in the dark. I can’t see his face under the brown hood. He makes a fist around the crystal, and then it’s gone.

  It takes a long time to cross the river. The water is thick as oil and I am careful to keep my hands inside the low edges of the boat. A dank fog rises off the water. Looking too hard at the current makes me dizzy. Instead I stare at my knees, the place where the fabric is fraying and I can see a patch of skin. I think of Jack’s hand there, of kissing him over the tarot cards, of Aurora laughing, blowing smoke out my window, drinking Dr Pepper in my bed. I think of the most ordinary things I can imagine. Puppies, why not? The godawful still life I am working on in art class. Cass blowing her brown hair out of her eyes while she measures herbs. Raoul putting Oscar Wilde on my head, Raoul laughing, Raoul bringing me hot chocolate with chilies in it. I think of Jack, not the musician but the person who is barely not a boy, smiling at me with his joker’s smile. Telling me to draw him pictures of kittens and sailboats, ridiculous things. Down here in the dark there is no light but the light I bring with me, and I will not fail. I will not fail. Do you hear me, Aurora, I am coming for you. I am coming. I’m not the kind of girl they’re looking for in hell. I’m not pretty; I don’t play instruments; half the time I can barely draw. But I’m the girl they’ll never forget, because I’m the girl who’ll win.

  At last I can make out the other side through the heavy dark. The ferryman poles the boat toward a smooth place where the bank flattens out. Dark sand, slick with the same oil that sheens the surface of the water. I catch one foot on the gunwale as I’m getting out, almost tip into the water, catch myself at the last minute, one hand inches from the surface. Something tells me I don’t want to get wet. I can feel Minos’s eyes on my back. “I’m fine,” I say, to no one but myself. Minos is moving past me, not waiting. I have to half-run to keep up with him. But I remember how fast he moved in the warehouse. This time, for whatever reason, he is letting me follow.

  We are standing on the edge of a vast bone-white plain that glows with an unholy light of its own under the empty sky. So Death’s great city welcomed armies of the dead. But there are no armies here, only me and the hot blood in my human veins. Ahead of us stands a palace. There’s no other word for it: looming, massive, rising out of the white rock like a tumor. Black stone walls, grease-shined like the river. I can see hundreds of doors all around it, and all of them are open. Locks don’t matter, here. My stomach knots, and I can’t catch my breath. This is more than anything I bargained for. This is not a place I should be, not a place anyone from my time or my world should ever have to see. Minos does not turn around, but he pauses. I can feel him, at the edges of my thoughts. Amused, contemptuous. His disdain kindles my courage. I take the first step forward, walk past him. I know where I’m going, now. He can follow me.

  It takes longer than I think it should to cross the white plain and draw close to the nearest door. Aurora, I think, Aurora, Aurora, Jack. Holding their names under my tongue like talismans, I take the first step inside.

  I am back in the penthouse apartment Aurora took me to. The room is empty and the chandeliers are unlit, the greasy candles melted into long strings of wax. Beyond the windows I see not the plain we crossed but the black ocean, the black sky of my dreams. It’s colder here than anywhere I’ve ever been. I draw my sleeves over my knuckles, but it’s no use. Nothing can keep out this chill. It slips between my ribs and down my throat. I shiver and tug at Raoul’s rosary. I’m starting to wonder if I will spend the rest of my life in places that aren’t entirely real, and then I think about where I am and how the rest of my life may not be a very long time at all, and then I decide to think about something else. Ripley. Thomas the Rhymer. Weetzie Bat. Plum sauce. Wendy Wanders. Raoul’s tamales. Oscar Wilde. Cheetos. JD with his homemade bomb. Cow tipping. Staying frosty. Keith Richards. Keith Richards is definitely cooler than Minos. Maybe even older. I think about bringing this up, decide against it.

  The room is smaller than I remember from the party. One wall is windowless, painted white and lined with oil paintings in simple frames. I walk closer, unable to help myself. Security guards at museums hate me; I’m forever trying to touch the art. These are a series of murky oil landscapes all done in a similar style. Each one is populated with tiny figures, their faces rendered in perfect detail. A man rolling a boulder up a hill, his shoulders covered in gore, his face full of pain. A man tied down, mouth open in a scream, while vultures tear open his belly. A line of sad-faced women trying to carry water in sieves. And people I know, too. People who lived too fast and died badly. When I find the picture of Aurora’s father, I am not surprised. He’s in the garden of Aurora’s house, looking at something outside the frame of the painting. His face looks the same way it does in my memory. At the very edge of the picture, there’s a half-obscured figure in a dress that might be Maia. Or Aurora.

  “This is fucked,” I say. I turn back to Minos, and then I see him. The tall pale man from the party, the one whose touch burned my skin. Minos’s boss. I can’t pretend anymore that I don’t know who he is, don’t know who the two people I love most in the world have been cutting bargains with. His ice-blue eyes are mocking. He’s standing by the windows on the far side of the room, as casual as if we were all at a cocktail party. Aurora lies crumpled at his feet. Please, let her be alive, I think. Please. Please.

  “Come forward,” says the ice-eyed man. I can feel my shoulder burning where the thorns pierced my skin. I cross the room. Slow, slow steps. If Aurora is dead I don’t want to know yet.

  But she isn’t: I can see that, when I’m standing in front of the god of hell. Faint rattle of breath in her throat, faint rise and fall of her chest. She’s so beautiful now she is transcendent, as though passing over from the realm of the living stripped her of any remaining imperfection. I am so filled with love for her I can hardly talk. “I came here for her,” I say.

  “I know what you came here for,” he says. “What will you give me for her?” The terrible eyes are amused.

  Once there was a musician who fell in love with a girl. When she died too young he followed her into darkness, played so beautifully that even the lord of death was moved. Take her, he said to the musician, and bring her to the world above. But if you falter on the path, she is ours forever.

  But I am not the musician, and I am not the girl. I am only myself, muscle and bone, stubborn and jealous and sometimes too mean, selfish and in love. I am only all the things that make me, and the best of those is her. I have nothing to offer the god of hell, no sweet-voiced song to trade, no unearthly beauty, no rare and precious gift. I can’t charm animals or fight kings or sail a fleet of ships to a hundred monster-haunted islands, trick a Cyclops, make a goddess fall in love with me. I curl my hands into fists and stand there, helpless and out of luck. I don’t even win at board games.

  Draw for us, Minos says. That death’s-head mask is as expressionless as ever. For the first time it occurs to me to wonder why he brought me here, why he shot me full of the same glimmering stuff that pulled Aurora down into the dark and then sent me home before I could cross all the way over. Why he led me down that long passage to this wretched palace of death. Why he’s offering me good advice now, reminding me of the single thing I know how to do better than anyone else I know. The two of them are watching me, inscrutable.

  Fine. Draw for them. That I can do. I sink to my haunches, take out my brushes and ink. My sketchboo
k. I turn to a blank page. Breathe in. Start to draw. I draw me and Aurora, the story of us. I draw us as little girls, clasping our bloody palms together and making promises about forever. I draw us in the pit, clothes sticking to our bodies, our faces jubilant, waiting for the next chord. I draw us in the woods, sleeping under a canopy of leaves. I draw the map we made on the walls of my room, the world we swore we’d find together. I draw the wretched mess of my own envy, draw the poison I let creep into my heart, draw how much I wanted her broken fairytale life, how much I wanted her perfect face, her endless charm. I draw us in her bathtub, laughing at each other. I draw Aurora as Ripley, battling aliens in the far reaches of space; I draw her as Aphrodite rising out of the ocean; I draw her as the mermaid Ondine singing mortals down to the deep. I draw her as I know her: capricious, fierce, lovely, beloved. I draw Raoul and Oscar Wilde, Raoul and the fish-stall boys, Raoul bringing me back to what matters over and over again. I draw what it cost me to leave Jack standing in that terrible room, draw how much I hope he’ll find what he’s looking for, the future bright and hopeful still. I draw a way out, a way through. Draw the light of his music moving through me, that impossible gift, the music that started all of this, that drew these old gods to us like cats batting mice for sport. I draw Cass and her tarot cards, counting out the ways to keep from saying sorry; Maia kicking aside the life raft and plunging into the deep. Both of them letting us go too far until we got to here. I draw as though I’m drawing for my life, for Aurora’s life, drawing us a way out of here, a way back to the world we lived in before, where everything was simpler and the only things that could hurt us were the things I already knew. I draw until my hands cramp into claws and my vision blurs and my fingers are black with ink. Sweat runs in stinging rivulets between my breasts. Aurora’s chest rises and falls. I draw for hours or days or months or years, I draw until time stops meaning anything at all. I draw until Minos bends down and gently takes the brushes from me. He stands and faces the ice-eyed man.