The Unfinished World

by Amber Sparks

  Curiosity #680: Magicienne pre-flint lighter, automatic match variety, circa 1891. French manufacture. Steel case with intricate, abstract engravings.

  When the war after the War came to County Antrim, Inge’s home burned. First drums, then fire, then her father put Inge and her sisters on a ship and shot himself. He sent them forth with what he had; a small but serviceable sum for passage and a few months’ food and shelter. The adult sisters now split from each other at the first port of call. Hannah went west, Clara went north; and Inge took a sack of books and a compass and hitched a ride on a steamer headed south. At eighteen she had some vague idea of a warm wind and a bright smudge of horizon, and an undiscovered island littered with coconut trees. She dreamed of sleeping under the stars, of fleeing the damp chill of her homeland.

  And so the Agnew sisterhood, never strong, dissolved like mist, and so the sisters were borne across vast oceans. The little figures moved over the waves, a tiny diaspora over the navy night of the seas.

  Inge’s full name was Ingeborg Adelaide Cecilia Agnew. The Adelaide was pure ornamentation, but the Cecilia substantive; it was after her English grandfather, Cecil. She wasn’t sure how so much of a name could seep into the blood, but she had been astonished to learn about his history after she wrote to Hannah about her new life. He lost his mind while stationed in the Transvaal, and once home, ran off (wrote Hannah, disapproval dripping from her careful round script) with a bareback rider in the circus. He gave his lands and title up to his younger brother to follow her, and returned alone four years later without a word of explanation. He mostly took up where he had left off, a stranger to his furious wife and his now-nearly-grown son—Inge’s father. He came back with nothing except a large black bag full of photographic equipment. He never said where it came from, and when his younger brother died, he moved the family to Larne to take over the family estate there as he’d been meant to do. But he remained passionately committed to photography for the rest of his life.

  When Inge set out, she knew none of this. Her grandfather was merely a portrait in the hallway, bearded and pale and deadly dull. She supposed she would be the same someday, and that some distant relation would be astonished to find this dry ancestor capable of acts of great passion. She was all long limbs and huge eyes, and she couldn’t run fast enough or see far enough to take the world in as she wanted to. So she took up photography as memory; she bought her first camera, a folding Kodak Brownie. She got it at one of her first stopovers, from a one-armed ex-whaler from Portsmouth living in Portugal with his common-law wife and children. He would bring his fish to the market and quote Shakespeare quite badly to anyone who would listen. He was Inge’s first friend, and though she knew he was mixing up Edgar and Edmund, still she loved to hear him pour forth Lear’s melancholy in his greasy, grizzled tones. She traded him her copy of The Collected Sonnets for the camera—that and a ride on his boat to the next seaport town.

  In Hollywood, Set loved to stand outside the studio and watch the chaos: beautiful women and men in costume, stagehands carrying backdrops and set pieces and props, cars and trucks and buggies, and especially the endless menagerie of animals: horses and bears and lions and tigers and cats and dogs and peacocks and orangutans and every kind of bird imaginable. Set even saw an octopus once, carried about in a giant glass tank by four men. It was rather small and sulky.

  While Cedric was on set, Set spent long hours sitting at the commissary making sketches of the local wildlife. One of the studio executives sat next to him one day at lunch and leaned over to see his drawings. Might as well make use of you while you’re hanging about, he told Set, and hired him on the spot as a captioner. Set was tasked with writing and illustrating captions for the intertitles, those floating dialogue screens. He liked best to draw birds and other things with wings. He charmed one of the stars of Cedric’s stable with a pair of origami swans, and twining from their beaks like ribbon, the words “You are as lovely and wild as the swans at Coole.” The actress, a vain, pretty thing, had never read Yeats but she murmured it like a mantra as he took her to bed that night. He took a fair number of women to bed. He was drawn to this new, bold kind of girl—these were brash, self-made beauties. And they were drawn to him, to his bright throwback beauty and his cool remove. Set had been shocked, almost, that he hadn’t simply disappeared, dissolved like smoke, the further the train took him from his family home. But it seemed he was substantial, not quite spirit-stuff, not in body, anyway. And a fair number of women at the studio seemed concerned primarily with the body. A fair number of men, too. Adonis was the name that stuck at Polytone, half in flattery, half in farce.

  Set quite liked California, in spite or perhaps because of it being so very different from New York. He liked the unsettled, seedy feeling of the place, the way the ground could actually shift under one’s feet—he’d always liked literal metaphors like that. He liked how there was a strange and wonderful self-sufficiency to the small shops scattered along the highways into town—palm readers butted up against fruit sellers butted up against one-pump filling stations and two-bit diners with grass-thatched roofs, the whole thing dotted and crosshatched with garish billboards. The swaying palms suggested a lazy paradise, but this part of the world was full of hustle, because everyone—from the men picking apples in the Valley, to the old ladies selling chiles, to the bit players clustered and queuing up for the next walk-on—everyone understood there was something new here, a second sort of gold rush for those willing to jump and run. Here, it was all flash. You could eat your dinner in a restaurant shaped like a hat. You could drink your Manhattan in a tiki hut. A sea of neon signs swarmed the airspace above the buildings, advertising dancing, girls, drinks, food, footwear, fashion, even faith; the religious revival shows that came to town would park in one of the big empty lots and throw up flashy signs with arrows pointing like the hand of god.

  But Cedric still hated it. He complained that the people were loud and vulgar, that the heat made his bones hurt, that he felt he was falling off the edge of the world.

  Set supposed it must look strange, the age difference between Cedric and himself. He was embarrassed by Cedric for the first time, and he was glad the people here didn’t seem to hold his brother’s behavior against him. Back home Cedric made sense. Old money was allowed its eccentricities. It was possibly expected of them.

  They never spoke of the swimming pool.

  Photograph: Snapshot of a pile of maps, folded and refolded and brightly colored. One shows elevation, one shows rivers and lakes and tributaries, one promises adventure: strange lands unseen by human eyes.

  For her nineteenth birthday, Inge got herself a new camera and a commission from National Geographic. In Buenos Aires, she’d met a photographer from the magazine who wanted to sleep with her, and—fascinated by the idea that one could be paid for one’s work—she took frank advantage. Sex in exchange for a leg up, so to speak. She began to make use of her novelty, as the rare female adventurer. It often gave her more access, more trust among the peoples she was photographing. The magazine saw her value, and kept her on. She wondered what the mustachioed governess would say, and smiled with no small pleasure at the thought.

  This time, she caught passage with a group of anthropologists on their way to study a remote island, where the natives tattooed their bodies and faces with a sharp shell and a paste made of coconut ash. The scientists had traveled there to study the rigid caste society, and the way the tattoos reflected each individual’s place in the group. Inge took photos of the beautiful, intricate designs; no straight lines, only curved and swirling marks, dark circles opening to spirals. Each body was a universe, marked by many galaxies.

  The scientists were older, Dutchmen, and they ignored her and spent evenings smoking in their separate camp. She was much more interested in the people of the island, and they were intrigued by her. They touched her hair and asked questions and, according to the interpreter, they called her Cloud Woman. Cloud Woman, they asked her, why is your sk
in so blank and empty? How did you drain the color from your hair? What is a photograph? She showed them the photographs after she’d developed them, told the people they would read like dreams to others. They told her the tattoos were maps, so that after they died, their spirits would know how to find their homes in the afterlife.

  Cloud Woman, the women asked, where are your children? Where is your man? When she laughed and told them she had neither, they looked at her gravely, disapproving. You must find them, they said.

  Before she sailed, she let them tattoo a small black cloud on her foot. This way, they told her, you will always know yourself. Perhaps it was the fermented island drink, but that warmed her somehow. Despite the pain, she felt a strange sense of comfort in the mapping of her own skin.

  Set liked it here in the sun, and these picture people forgave him his own reserve, mostly because he was friendly and graceful and of course, so very pretty. He’d never known he was before; it made him a little selfish and a little sad, too, because the brightness covered up the dark pull down he often felt. He wondered that no one else could see it. He laughed, often, not because he was joyful but because it was easy to let your mouth fall open here. Ease was easy to fake. Hollywood attracted the strange, anyway—Set was in a sense just one more sideshow attraction, the beautiful man with a hole where his soul ought to be.

  But Cedric stuck out like a relic. He seemed drawn in different, drabber paints, a strange figure against the bright Los Angeles landscape. People here lived fast, but easy—just the opposite of meticulous Cedric. He could spend years on a dig; he’d spent decades just mapping the Antarctic. He didn’t understand this place, so new and full of cheerful ruthlessness. Set was hardly surprised when one day he returned to their rented bungalow and found Cedric on the porch, his bags at his feet, his frozen expression a thousand miles away.

  You’re going away, Set said. He’d expected it.

  We’re going away, boy, said Cedric. Go and get your things together. We must be at the station, in one hour sharp.

  Set envisioned sitting on the train in defeat, winding through the San Gabriel Mountains, watching the bustle recede and fade into landscape. Why? he asked.

  Cedric grinned. My city, he said. My city has been discovered at last!

  I don’t know what you mean, said Set.

  The lost Arctic city, said Cedric. The one the Innu spoke of.

  I thought that was a myth, Set said. Just a story.

  Myth is often something more, said Cedric, and he laughed. Whale bones, boy! The coastal natives found an entire pitful, at Point Hope. Point Hope! It begs the impossible, does it not? I received the telegram just this morning.

  Set sat down slowly on the porch swing. He rocked, and rocked, and did not look at Cedric; felt the cold disapproval rolling over him just the same. I’m not going, he finally said. There was a long, long silence.

  And after, though Cedric shouted at him for a quarter of an hour, though he called him all sorts of rude and unfilial names, though he threatened and cajoled and pleaded, Set would not be moved. In the end, Cedric went to find his lost city alone, and Set stayed and took over Cedric’s film. He chose to stay, in the sun, out of the shadow of Ced’s obsession. For the first time in his life, he was finally free of his family. Free, or adrift. He wasn’t sure which.

  On her twentieth birthday, Inge received word that her sister Clara had died. She did not attend the funeral. She had written to Clara, at the beginning of the sisters’ separation—some small concession to the blood they shared—but Clara never replied. Inge was hardly surprised; they were like strangers to each other. And so she wrote to Hannah instead: dull, disapproving Hannah, who could not resist writing sanctimoniously back. She enjoyed the victory of virtue. I am in lovely, lively Rio, Inge would write to Hannah, and Hannah would write back, You are in the lap of mortal sin. That sort of thing. Hannah did not approve of Inge’s hand-to-mouth existence, of her vocation. It was 1920, Inge wrote her, prickly. Perfectly acceptable for women to have careers of their own. Father’s money had long since run out, and how else was she expected to eat? She could marry, wrote Hannah, and Inge laughed to think of such a thing. Who on earth would she marry? And why, when she could travel alone with all the freedom she liked? When she could document the wilds of the world?

  So instead of dutifully heading to Finland, where Clara had died in childbirth like their mother, or slinking off to Hannah in Newfoundland, sins unrolled before her—Inge made her first dirigible flight. She’d read about this miracle, this new weightless ship in the sky, and though there were no commercial flights yet, she managed to make herself very charming to a military pilot taking a test run, from Rio de Janeiro to Friedrichshafen. She shared his cabin, and she was happy to be a Hure for the chance to fly, to skip from shore to shore like a gull. Once on land, she decided to find her mother’s people, but when she wrote Hannah from Germany, her sister wrote back that she had no idea how to find them. Her beloved aunt had left Berlin after the War with no forwarding address, just disappeared, and the relatives in Ludwigshafen were all dead or dispersed. Hannah wrote that it was just the two of them now, but it might as well be that she had no sister at all, so slight was Inge’s sense of filial duty.

  Inge sat at a café on the Bodensee and read the letter three, four, ten times. The other patrons cast suspicious looks her way—there was a deep distrust of foreigners in Germany after the War, and though she looked the part, her German was poor and marked her out.

  When they were children, Hannah sometimes brushed Inge’s hair until her younger sister’s scalp bled. She’d scowl, as if it were Inge’s fault that she was born with her hair in knots. But then there was this, also. When Inge was six, she dreamt her father had become a vulture, was waiting for and willing her death. His red eyes reeked of ugly, carrion thoughts. She woke, crying, and crept down the hall to Hannah and Clara’s room. Clara put the covers over her head, but Hannah invited her in. You may stay with me tonight, she said, and tucked her arm around the young Inge as though she were a well-loved doll. And Inge was warm, and—so briefly!—happy.

  We are, thought Inge, such a strange series of beings. No constancy among us. Tomorrow she would develop her zeppelin pictures—surely National Geographic or Travel would snap them up—and try to scrape together passage for the first ship she could find. But now, she sat and watched the wind roll over the Bodensee, rippling the waters and moving restlessly on.

  Curiosity #84: Aztec volcanic rock sculpture, circa fifteenth century A.D., probably made for the temple of Tenochtitlan. An example of a traditional demon princess, or Cihuateteo, who escorts the sun from the underworld each morning, she wears a simple skirt, breasts bared, hair long and over her shoulders.

  The truth about Set is the truth about all ghosts: there is a weightlessness that keeps them fluttering, light as leaves—and in turn they are drawn down to instability, to the volatile, to cracks that open and can split whole mountains. To the volcanoes. Specifically, in Set’s case, to Lana Volcana.

  That wasn’t her real name, of course, or even her screen name. But it was what they all called her after her breakout picture, Vera and the Volcano—a two-reeler about an island girl that sent her star up and up. LANA VOLCANA! the picture magazines screeched, with accompanying photographs of a dark-haired vamp in a grass skirt and clamshell top. The IT GIRL, the papers called her, a new kind of girl for these daring times. Filmstar Rag said she was the girl you don’t bring home to mama.

  In Hollywood, Set found that alone among the beautiful people, his hollow place itched, emptier than ever. He had love affairs, of course, but he could find no way to feel love for the pretty young women he admired. Up close he found people attractive but flawed; there was an eagerness for closeness that repelled even as it attracted him. He worried that perhaps he could not love, and so he chose the fire that burned the brightest and he jumped in headfirst. Worry about scars later, he told himself. He needed to see if he could ever be warmed, if others could be w
armed by him. Never mind his own emotions; was it possible to love a dead man?

  Lana and Set first collided when Set was desperately searching for a leopard for a reshoot of a scene from his latest nature documentary, In the Jungle. Lana kept a pet leopard, Leopold, and she brought him in and ensnared Set in the first five minutes. Set had never seen a woman with a leopard on a leash, though he’d heard the stories. He’d heard, and soon discovered it was true, that her chauffeur drove her about in a black Rolls with white velvet interiors while her two Russian wolfhounds hung their heads out the windows in a most undignified fashion. Set supposed she must love animals. But she loved one thing only: spectacle, and anything that helped her to make it. She was drawn to Set because he was pretty, and putty in her hands. That was all she ever needed of men. (It was whispered that her real fire was reserved for women, but it would not be until her lonely later years, doing film rag interviews for cash in her motel room, that she would admit the truth of this.)

  Lana Volcana believed in self-improvement. She encouraged Set to quit the studio and set up his own production company. You need to be with the brightest stars, she would say, and he would think first not of Greta Garbo or John Barrymore, but of Cassiopeia, of Orion, of the gods and demigods of the prominent constellations. Lana herself was briefly the brightest star of them all, burning with a fierce intensity, given to passionate histrionics and an outsize sense of drama. She was famous for her fame even in a town where that was quickly becoming the rule, rather than the exception.

  That winter, Lana bundled Set off to New York City and made him dance till 4 a.m. at the Stork Club’s big bash. She was fried on gin when she introduced him to Carl Akley Jr., but he and Carl liked each other just the same. Carl had met Cedric years ago, and he made Set promise to come by the American Museum of Natural History, where he’d introduce him to the people who helped set up the expeditions. They needed a good director.