“An apt analogy, sir. Yet, is it not such a journey you, yourself, have undertaken?”
“Not at all,” said Rat. “This particular peregrination wasn’t my idea. I never said, ‘Well, Horatio, I’m going to go improve my soul, whatever the consequences. See you later!’ I didn’t create this situation; I’m just reacting to it. The instinct for survival, I suppose. I don’t want to become one of your lawn ornaments.”
“I perceive the distinction, sir.”
“An important one.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rat sipped his tea. “Good stuff, this,” he said, for the first time expressing his appreciation for any of the comestibles Cummings had provided. “I’ve never been a tea drinker.”
Cummings beamed around the edges. “I find it a relaxing beverage, sir. Restorative and contemplative.”
“Thank you.”
“You are most welcome, sir.”
It was the also the first time the Inhabitant had expressed a sentiment of gratitude. Cummings found the development heartening. Once more he was interposing his charge between the sheets, this time those on a well-used brass bed.
“It occurs to me, Cummings,” Rat said, the threads of his thoughts already succumbing to those of another’s awareness, “we don’t seem to transmigrate from one room to another. I have the impression I’ve just been in one room all along.”
“You forget the intervening days, sir. At the conclusion of each, I show you to another room. It is, apparently, not until you have been tucked in that you become aware of your surroundings.”
“Very metaphysical.”
“A modus operandi of the island, sir.”
“The day was passed pleasantly?”
Cummings would have smiled broadly had the practice of his facial muscles permitted. “You surpassed yourself, sir.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, sir.”
“Keep it to yourself, Cummings. World without end, amen.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Better yet, forget it altogether.”
“There are some things graven upon the mind and heart, sir, that no amount of effort can eradicate.”
“Never mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are we off to this time?”
Cummings looked around the room, the walls of which were covered with peeling paper whose designs were heavily baroque. A carpet rested upon the rough board floor, one that had perhaps once in its history graced a elegant home, but those glory days were far behind it. A parade of feet had long since obscured the delicacy of its design. A table near the bed, imported long ago from the east coast by wagon train, also bore the marks of age and misuse with waning grace. Upon it was a washstand and hastily folded towel. Lace curtains were drawn over the open window and flagged lazily in a hot, dust-laden breeze that troubled the room’s inherent miasma of sweat, alcohol, and cheap perfume.
“The room is not one with which I am familiar, sir,” said Cummings. “But I am possessed of the sensation your habitation will be a defining one. If there is nothing else?”
“I’m feeling weepy,” said Rat, his eyelids weighted with fatigue. “I’m going to be a female again.”
“Good night, sir,” said Cummings, and Rat was alone.
A large mirror set in an ornate frame, the gilding of which was cracked in places and absent in others, stood at attention on a bureau opposite the bed. The reflection of Rat therein—or rather of his soul—was metamorphosing into that of a woman. Her name was McGill and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy. She was thirty years old. A prostitute. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring blindly out the window, awaiting her next client. A customer like no other. Shuddering within, she sipped the bitter dregs of her . . .
Philosopher’s Tea
The fourteenth night
A sound broke her trance. She turned to find a short man of medium build sitting on the wicker-backed chair on the other side of the bed. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, standing. She placed the empty teacup on the windowsill and, as was her habit, began to disrobe. “You know the terms?”
“I do,” said the man. “Do you?”
She hesitated, an unsure smile on her lips. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know the terms?”
“I should. I’m the one who sets them, aren’t I?”
“You do indeed.”
She couldn’t place his accent, something she prided herself on her ability to do. She may learn nothing else of her clients—not their life stories, not their names, nothing, in fact, of any importance—but she could usually peg an accent to within a few miles. It was a recreation she allowed herself while her clients were busy with theirs.
“Then let’s get on with it.”
The man gazed at her, but it was not the lecherous and hungry gaze she knew so well. It was something else in his eyes. Something dangerous, threatening in a way she couldn’t define. “What do you want?”
“What do you have to give?”
“You’re the client,” she said, sensitive to a nervousness she hadn’t felt in a very long time. She doubted there was a demand she hadn’t heard. In her experience, men were not imaginative animals, their desires generally encompassed by a list of no more than ten variations on an ancient theme. “Surprise me.”
The man had a beard, as did most men west of the Rio Grande. Theirs, though, were merely the growth of neglect. This man’s beard was trimmed in a curious fashion: short, groomed to subtle tapers at the corners. His clothes, too, were strange. A loose-fitting linen shirt was tied closely about his neck and hung halfway to his knees. Under this he wore denim jeans. He had no holster. No gun. No hat. None of the accessories of the typical cowhand.
She didn’t like beards, but given that they were the rule rather than the exception, she’d learned to live with them.
“Tell me your name,” he said, not moving from his chair as she arranged herself on the bed.
“Why?”
“You asked me what I wanted.”
“You want my name?”
“To begin with.”
He didn’t ravage her with his eyes, which was unsettling. Her looks were her income, and she was always mindful of the fact they wouldn’t last forever. He looked at her as if . . . as if she was something rare, searching her at depths beyond her nakedness. “Lil,” she said.
“But they call you Nancy.”
“They told you that downstairs.”
He smiled, but she couldn’t bear it. She looked away.
He was very short. She found his confidence unnerving. How did so inconsequential a man dare go unarmed, so obviously foreign and out of place, in such a wild country? She wanted to ask him.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
“You.”
“What do you want?” she snapped. It was never difficult to determine the demands of her customers. She pulled a sheet across her, but felt no less naked beneath his gaze.
“I want to know what happened to you.”
“To me? Nothing happened to me. And nothing’s going to happen to you, either, if you don’t get on with it. The clock’s running. You can play word games if you want, but you still pay.”
“I have paid already.”
“Downstairs?”
“In full,” he said.
“Then talk away,” she said. She sat up and propped a pillow behind her back. The brass bed slapped the wall with a familiar thump. She challenged him with hard eyes, but could feel her soul contract before his returning gaze.
“Tell me where you’re from,” he said.
She laughed hoarsely. “I’m a princess,” she said, affecting her speech with a haughtiness she didn’t feel. “From the courts of European royalty. What do you care?”
“Tell me where you’re from,” he said again, nothing changing in his expression or demeanor.
She lowered her head. “Ireland.”
“Was
that so hard?”
Oddly, it was. Long experience had inured her to giving away her flesh, but to give up her thoughts . . . these were all she had left of herself.
“Where are you from?” she asked. It was a fair question now.
“I’ve been to Ireland,” he said, his eyes softening further, but no less intense upon her. He didn’t blink. “It’s a lovely country.”
So it was. All at once a torrent of memories tumbled from the places in her mind where she’d kept them captive. Suddenly her senses were overwhelmed by smells and sights and sounds of her youth, so visceral that she drew her breath. She heard her mother calling to her. “Lilly! Lilly! Supper’s ready! Time to come home!”
Suddenly she was no longer a whore, swaddled by dirty sheets in a cheap brothel. She was fourteen years old. A virgin. A child of the clean and bracing wind of the North Sea. A child whose life lay before her, whose dreams for it were still forming.
These were memories she’d forbidden herself. She knew, now, what became of that child and of those dreams. She shook them from her mind and braced herself against the back of the bed.
“What do you want?”
“Why don’t you like to think about it?” said the man. His way of turning aside her questions, of answering them with questions of his own, was maddening.
“You seem to know so much. You tell me.”
“You tell me,” he said. His eyes were kind, but it was a kindness that bored into her unflinchingly. “I’ve paid.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you want to tell?”
She relented. “Because I’m here, aren’t I? You know what I am. You know what I do for a living. You must know I wasn’t always a whore. Do you imagine this was my dream? Do you think this is where I’ve found my happiness?” She pounded the mattress with angry fists, punctuating her words with caustic, emphatic laughter in which there was no music.
He stared at her.
“Then why are you here?”
She looked out the window. “Because . . .” The landscape of her recollection was swept by bitter remembrances of all the little decisions, all the bitter circumstances that had swept her to this lifeless shore. “Because God has forsaken me,” she whispered.
He said nothing.
She looked at him with flashing eyes. “What do you want from me?”
“That your life should mean something to you.”
“This is what I mean!” she said, again smashing the mattress with her fists. “A few minutes’ release for men who regard me as nothing more than a receptacle for their needs.” She had meant her anger to cow him, to scourge him with the guilt of his sex, but it didn’t.
“And you are content with that?”
“I have no choice, have I? I have to eat. To put a roof over my head, don’t I? Would you rather I lay down and die?”
“No.”
“Then what would you have me do?”
“Be the person you had hoped to be.”
She studied her fingers. “You can’t go back and change things.”
“You can go forward and change them.”
“That won’t change the past.”
“The past is gone.”
“It’s what we’ve been that makes us what we are.”
“And what you resolve makes you what you will be. Shouldn’t life be more than a series of memories you try to put behind you?”
She stared at him.
“Yet these are what you’re forging every day in this place. Memories you will spend your life trying to outrun. And you never will.”
Her eyes sought relief outside the window, where there was nothing but prairie, and dust, and lifelessness. “I know.” She started with a sudden thought. “I know what you are! You’re a preacher, aren’t you? Some kind of religious fanatic. You’re trying to save me!” She laughed contemptuously and immediately became the coquette. “Perhaps you would like to exorcise a few demons of your own,” she said, dropping the sheet. “The last fellow who tried to save me had dozens of ’em. He left in tears. I think he was very thankful.”
The attack was meant to be unexpected, to throw him off balance. Nothing about him changed. She felt doubly unclean and drew the sheet up under her chin. “How much longer do you require?”
“I’ve paid in full,” he said.
“That entitles you to half an hour,” she said.
“Then half an hour.”
“Suit yourself,” she glanced at the wall as if a clock hung there. “You’ve got ten minutes to save me. Spend it as you wish.”
“Then we will spend it with your memories.”
“I told you, I’ve put ’em away. They’ve nothing to do with me.”
“Tell me all you’ve done.”
“In ten minutes?”
“Tell me what you can in ten minutes.”
“About what? Ireland?”
“About the last two months,” said the man.
“The last two months were the same as today,” she said. “Every day is the same.”
“Then tell me about it.”
“Oh! I see! You like to talk about it! That does it for you, does it? Hearing all the nasty little details.” She leered at him over the sheet, but knew at once she was mistaken. “You want a confession, don’t you?”
“I don’t require one. Do you?”
“I know what I’ve done . . . what I do. It’s no secret.”
“Then tell me about it.”
And she did. Not for ten minutes. Not for an hour. But until she was so fogged with sleep she could scarcely make sense of her thoughts. But still the words poured out of her, as scalding and searing and cleansing as magma. By dawn, her sins, and heartaches, and passion, and pain crowded the room so thickly it was nearly impossible to breathe. She was limp, fevered with exhaustion. Naked not only in flesh, but to the most carefully hidden, most intimately secret recesses of herself. There was nothing about her the man didn’t know. The rape. The pain. Her flight from everything she loved. The bloody abortion. The guilt. Running. Always running.
She had given the man what he wanted. His appetite had been insatiable, but she knew, even as her foundations shook and reeled, and eventually collapsed, that he would be content with nothing less.
“What now?” she sobbed.
There was no reply. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d opened her eyes. She opened them now. The man was gone. On the wall behind the chair in which he’d sat the cross-members of the window carved the sunlight into a crucifix. There was no other sign of his having been there. No troubling of the room whatsoever, beyond a piece of crumpled brown paper on the edge of the bed.
She picked it up and unfolded it. A receipt, scrawled in a rough hand in deep, red ink on the back of a piece of wallpaper.
“Paid in full.”
“Your most recent foray has left you pensive, sir,” Cummings observed. He had floated into the bedchamber some minutes previous and, perceiving that a time-out would benefit the Occupant, whose only indication of being other than a waxwork figure was to now and then thoughtlessly adjust the straps on his low-cut negligee—a saucy little number in burlap and flannel—left him to himself for a space.
Rat had been staring not at his reflection in the mirror, as was his habit when waking, but at a washed-out rectangle of light slowly crawling up the wall, which was divided and subdivided by the cross-members of the window that admitted it. The simple design seemed to captivate him, though whether the thoughts it engendered were happy or not it was impossible to infer from his expression, which was inscrutable, but, Cummings felt, profound. Hence his inquiry.
Rat didn’t respond immediately. His attention was so fully upon the wall that even the aromatic tendrils of steaming tea were having difficulty weaving their way through the thick, contorted undergrowth of his ruminations to the functioning regions of his cognitive apparatus.
“Cummings,” he said at last.
“Sir?”
<
br /> “I have been a whore.”
Cummings, a specialist in the art of finessing delicate subjects, had become accustomed to Rat’s directness. Nevertheless, he was unable to address the declaration in any but an upright position, so he stood up. “A lady of easy virtue, sir?” he suggested as an alternative. “A woman of wide experience?”
“Euphemisms, Cummings,” Rat snapped with a tempestuous tug at a wayward strap. “A whore. A receptacle. Shall I be more direct?”
“Please, sir,” said Cummings quickly, a warm glow, like a rose-red sunset, spread across the prodigious dome of his forehead, “no. I apprehend you completely.”
Rat had not, in the preceding exchange, removed his eyes from the oblong of light on the wall. “The profession gets all fuzzed up in the movies,” he said. “But it’s the nastiest job there is.” He looked up. “I’m no saint, Cummings. I’ve sashayed through the sewers, morally speaking, if you know what I mean, but I’ve never felt so . . . unclean. Clear through me.” He shivered. “But she was used to it. That’s the scary thing. She convinced herself she didn’t deserve any better.”
“A fallen angel, sir.”
“Knock it off, Cummings,”
“As you wish.”
Rat’s gaze returned to the patch of light. “Know what happens when people have sex, Cummings?”
The sunset upon the butler’s brow reddened. “I am familiar with the general outline of the proceedings, sir. Yes.”
“I don’t mean biologically,” said Rat. “I mean spiritually.”
Cummings rearranged his cufflinks. “I am not aware of a spiritual component to the activity, sir.”
“Neither was I,” said Rat. “But there is. The physical act is just mimicry. What’s really going on is the mingling of souls.” For the first time his eyes drifted to the gnomish reflection of his soul in the mirror. “How many women do you think I’d’ve gotten between the sheets if they knew that was crawlin’ up inside ’em, worming its way into their soul like some escapee from Alien, leaving a kind of spiritual soap scum that would stay there forever?”
Storyteller Page 22
