Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Well, at least it’s stopped making that sound. That’s good enough for me.” Joe takes out a pack of Camels, offers one to Frank, and Frank shakes his head no. A month now since his last cigarette, quitting because Willa’s stepmother is dying of lung cancer, quitting because cigarettes cost too goddamn much, anyhow. “Thanks, though,” he says.

  “Whatever,” Joe Manske mumbles around the filter of his Camel, thumb on the strike wheel of his silver lighter, and in a moment the air is filled with the pungent aroma of burning tobacco. Frank gives up on the dubious sandwich, drops it back into the brown bag and crumples the bag into a greasy ball.

  “I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ job,” Joe says, disgusted, smoky cloud of words hanging about his head, and he points at the stockroom doors with his cigarette. “You just missed a real piece of work, man.”

  “Yeah?” Frank tosses the sandwich ball towards the big plastic garbage can sitting a few feet away, misses, and it rolls behind the busted Canon 2400 color copier that’s been sitting in the same spot since he started this job a year ago.

  “Yeah,” Joe says. “I was trying to finish that pet store job and this dude comes in, little bitty old man looks like he just got off the boat from Poland or Armenia or some Balkan shit – ”

  “My grandfather was Polish,” Frank says, and Joe sighs loudly, a long impatient sigh. He flicks ash onto the cement floor.

  “You know what I mean,” Joe says.

  “So what’d he want, anyway?” Frank asks, not because he cares, but the shortest way through any conversation with Joe Manske is usually right down the middle, just be quiet and listen, and sooner or later he’ll probably come to the end and shut up.

  “He had this old book with him. The damned thing must have been even older than him, and it was falling apart. I don’t think you could so much as look at it without the pages crumbling. Had it tied together with some string, right, and he kept askin’ me all these questions, real technical shit about the machines, you know.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Dude, I don’t know. I can’t remember half of it, techie shit, like I was friggin’ Mr. Wizard or Bill Gates or somethin’. I finally just told him we couldn’t be responsible if the copiers messed up his old book, but he still kept on askin’ these questions. Lucky for me, one of the self-service machines jammed, and I told him I had to go fix it. By the time I was finished, he was gone.”

  “You live to serve,” Frank says, wondering if Willa would be able to tell if he had just one cigarette. “The customer is always right.”

  “Fuck that shit,” Joe Manske says. “I don’t get paid enough to have to listen to some senile old fart jabberin’ at me all day.”

  “Yes, sir, helpful is your middle name.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Frank laughs and gets up, pushes the milk crate towards the wall with the toe of one shoe so no one’s going to come along later and trip over it, break their neck and have him to blame. “I better get back to work,” he says.

  “You do that,” Joe grumbles and puffs his Camel.

  Through the stockroom doors and back out into the stifling, noisy clutter of the shop. It must be at least ten degrees warmer out here, he thinks. There’s a line at the register and the phone’s ringing, no one out front but Maggie, and she glowers at him across the chaos.

  “I’m on it,” Frank says. She shakes her head doubtfully and turns to help a woman wearing a dark purple dress and matching beret. Frank’s reaching across the counter for the telephone receiver when he notices a business card lying near a display of Liquid Paper. Black sans-serif print on an expensive white cotton card stock and what appears to be an infinity symbol printed in the lower left-hand corner. FOUND: LOST WORLDS centered at the top, TERRAE NOVUM ET TERRAE INDETERMINATA on the next line down in smaller letters. Then a name and an address – Dr. Solomon Monalisa, PhD, 43 W. 61st St., Manhattan – but no number or e-mail, and Frank picks up the card, holds it so Maggie can see.

  “Where’d this come from?” he asks, but she only shrugs, annoyed but still smiling her strained and weary smile for the woman in the purple beret. “Beats me. Ask Joe, if he ever comes back. Now, will you please answer the phone?”

  He apologizes, lifts the receiver, “Gotham Kwick Kopy, Frank speaking. How may I help you?” and slips the white card into his back pocket.

  The group meets in the basement of a synagogue on Eldridge Street. Once a month, eight o’clock until everyone who wants to talk has taken his or her turn, coffee and stale doughnuts before and afterwards. Metal folding chairs and a lectern down front, a microphone and crackly PA system even though the room isn’t really large enough to need one. Never more than fourteen or fifteen people, occasionally as few as six or seven, and Frank and Willa always sit at the very back, near the door. Sometimes Willa doesn’t make it all the way through a meeting. She says she hates the way they all watch her if she gets up to leave early, like she’s done something wrong, she says, like this is all her fault, somehow. So they sit by the door, which is fine with Frank; he’d rather not have everyone staring at the back of his head, anyway.

  He’s sipping at a styrofoam cup of the bitter black coffee, three sugars and it’s still bitter, watching the others, all their familiar telltale quirks and peculiarities, their equivocal glances, when Willa comes in. First the sound of her clunky motorcycle boots on the concrete steps, and then she lingers in the doorway a moment, that expression like it’s always the first time for her and it can never be any other way.

  “Hey,” Frank says quietly. “Yeah, I made it,” she replies and sits down beside him. There’s a stain on the front of her Curious George T-shirt that looks like chocolate sauce.

  “How was your day?” he asks her, talking so she doesn’t lock up before things even get started.

  “Same as ever. It sucked. They didn’t fire Miss Kazakhstan.”

  “That’s good, dear. Would you like a martini?” and he jabs a thumb towards the free-coffee-and-stale-doughnut table. “I think I’ll pass,” Willa says humorlessly, rubbing her hands together and stares at the floor between her feet. “I think my stomach hurts enough already.”

  “Would you rather just go home? We can miss one night. I sure as hell don’t care – ”

  “No,” she says, answering too fast, too emphatically, so he knows she means yes. “That would be silly. I’ll be fine when things get started.”

  And then Mr. Zaroba stands, stocky man with skin like tea-stained muslin, salt-and-pepper hair and beard and his bushy grey eyebrows. Kindly blue grandfather eyes, and he raises one hand to get everyone’s attention, as if they aren’t all looking at him already, as if they haven’t all been waiting for him to open his mouth and break the tense, uncertain silence.

  “Good evening, everyone,” he says, and Willa sits up a little straighter in her chair, that expectant arch of her back as though she’s getting ready to run.

  “Before we begin,” Mr. Zaroba continues, “there’s something I wanted to share. I came across this last week.” He takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolds it, and begins to read. An item from the New York Tribune, February 17th, 1901. Reports by an Indian tribe in Alaska of a city in the sky that was seen sometimes, and a prospector named Willoughby who claimed to have witnessed the thing himself in 1897, claimed to have tried to photograph it on several occasions and succeeded, finally.

  “And now this,” Zaroba says, and he pulls a second folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, presto, bottomless bag of tricks, that pocket, and this time he reads from a book, Alaska by Miner Bruce, page 107, he says. Someone else who saw the city suspended in the arctic sky, a Mr. C. W. Thornton of Seattle. “‘It required no effort of the imagination to liken it to a city,’” Mr. Zaroba reads, “‘but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.’”

  People shift nervously in their seats, scuff their feet, and someone whispers too loudly.

  “I have th
e prospector’s photograph,” Zaroba says. “It’s only a Xerox from the book, of course. It isn’t very clear, but I thought some of you might like to see it,” and he hands one of the sheets of paper to the person sitting nearest him.

  “Damn, I need a cigarette,” Willa whispers.

  “You and me both,” Frank whispers back. It takes almost five minutes for the sheet of paper to make its way to the rear of the room, passed along from hand to hand to hand while Zaroba stands patiently at the front, his head bowed solemnly as if leading a prayer. Some hold onto it as long as they dare and others hardly seem to want to touch it. A man three rows in front of them gets up and brings it back to Willa.

  “I don’t see nothing but clouds,” he says, sounding disappointed.

  And neither does Frank, fuzzy photograph of a mirage, deceit of sunlight in the collision of warm and freezing air high above a glacier, but Willa must see more. She holds the paper tight and chews at her lower lip, tracing the distorted peaks and cumulonimbus towers with the tip of an index finger.

  “My god,” she whispers.

  In a moment, Zaroba comes up the aisle and takes the picture away, leaves Willa staring at her empty hands, her eyes wet like she might start crying. Frank puts an arm around her bony shoulders, but she immediately wiggles free and scoots her chair a few inches farther away.

  “So, who wants to get us started tonight?” Mr. Zaroba asks when he gets back to the lectern. At first no one moves or speaks or raises a hand, each looking at the others or trying hard to look nowhere at all. And then a young woman stands up, younger than Willa, filthy clothes and bruise-dark circles under her eyes, hair that hasn’t been combed or washed in ages. Her name is Janice, and Frank thinks that she’s a junkie, probably a heroin addict because she always wears long sleeves.

  “Janice? Very good, then,” and Mr. Zaroba returns to his seat in the first row. Everyone watches Janice as she walks slowly to the front of the room, or they pretend not to watch her. There’s a small hole in the seat of her dirty threadbare jeans, and Frank can see that she isn’t wearing underwear. She stands behind the lectern, coughs once, twice, and brushes her shaggy bangs out of her face. She looks anxiously at Mr. Zaroba.

  “It’s all right, Janice,” he says. “Take all the time you need. No one’s going to rush you.”

  “Bullshit,” Willa mutters, loud enough that the man sitting three rows in front of them turns and scowls. “What the hell are you staring at,” she growls, and the man turns back towards the lectern.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Frank says and takes her hand, squeezes hard enough that she can’t shake him loose this time. “We can leave anytime you want.”

  Janice coughs again, and there’s a faint feedback whine from the mike. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I was only fourteen years old,” she begins. “I still lived with my foster parents in Trenton, and there was this old cemetery near our house, Riverview Cemetery. Me and my sister, my foster sister, we used to go there to smoke and talk, you know, just to get away from the house.”

  Janice looks at the basement ceiling while she speaks, or down at the lectern, but never at the others. She pauses and wipes her nose again.

  “We went there all the time. Wasn’t anything out there to be afraid of, not like at home. Just dead people, and me and Nadine weren’t afraid of dead people. Dead people don’t hurt anyone, right? We could sit there under the trees in the summer, and it was almost like things weren’t so bad. Nadine was almost a year older than me.”

  Willa tries to pull her hand free, digging her nails into Frank’s palm, but he doesn’t let go. They both know where this is going, have both heard Janice’s story so many times they could recite it backwards, same tired old horror story. “It’s okay,” he says out loud, to Willa or to himself.

  “Mostly it was just regular headstones, but there were a few big crypts set way back near the water. I didn’t like being around them. I told her that, over and over, but Nadine said they were like little castles, like something out of fairy tales.

  “One day one of them was open. Maybe someone had busted into it, and Nadine had to see if there were still bones inside. I begged her not to, said whoever broke it open might still be hanging around somewhere, and we ought to go home and come back later. But she wouldn’t listen to me. I didn’t want to look inside. I swear to God, I didn’t.”

  “Liar,” Willa whispers, so low now that the man three rows in front of them doesn’t hear, but Frank does. Her nails are digging deeper into his palm, and his eyes are beginning to water from the pain. “You wanted to see,” she says. “Just like the rest of us, you wanted to see.”

  “I said, ‘What if someone’s still in there?’ but she wouldn’t listen. She wasn’t ever afraid of anything. She used to lay down on train tracks just to piss me off.”

  “What did you see in the crypt, Janice, when you and Nadine looked inside?” Mr. Zaroba asks, but there’s no hint of impatience in his voice, not hurrying her or prompting, only helping her find a path across the words as though they were slippery rocks in a cold stream. “Can you tell us?”

  Janice takes a very deep breath and swallows. “Stairs,” she says. “Stairs going down into the ground. There was a light way down at the bottom, a blue light, like a cop car light. Only it wasn’t flashing. And we could hear something moving around down there, and something else that sounded like a dog panting. I tried to get Nadine to come back to the house with me then, but she wouldn’t. She said ‘Those stairs might go anywhere, Jan. Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to know?’”

  Another pause, and “I couldn’t stop her,” Janice says.

  Willa mutters something Frank doesn’t understand, then, something vicious, and he lets go of her hand, rubs at the four crescent-shaped wounds her nails leave behind. Blood drawn, crimson tattoos to mark the wild and irreparable tear in her soul by marking him. He presses his palm to his black work pants, no matter if it stains, no one will ever notice.

  “I waited at the top of the stairs until dark,” Janice says. “I kept on calling her. I called her until my throat hurt. When the sun started going down, the blue light at the bottom got brighter, and once or twice I thought I could see someone moving around down there, someone standing between me and the light. Finally, I yelled I was going to get the goddamn cops if she didn’t come back…” Janice trails off, hugging herself like she’s cold and gazes straight ahead, but Frank knows she doesn’t see any of them sitting there, watching her, waiting for the next word, waiting for their turns at the lectern.

  “You don’t have to say any more tonight,” Zaroba tells her. “You know we’ll all understand if you can’t.”

  “No,” Janice says. “I can… I really need to,” and she squeezes her eyes shut tight. Mr. Zaroba stands and takes one reassuring step towards the lectern.

  “We’re all right here,” he says.

  “We’re listening,” Willa mumbles mockingly.

  “We’re listening,” Zaroba says a second later.

  “I didn’t go get the police. I didn’t tell anyone anything until the next day. My foster parents, they just thought she’d run away again. No one would believe me when I told them about the crypt, when I told them where Nadine had really gone. Finally, they made me show them, though, the cops did, so I took them out to Riverview.”

  “Why do we always have to fucking start with her?” Willa whispers. “I can’t remember a single time she didn’t go first.”

  Someone sneezes.

  “It was sealed up again,” Janice says, her small and brittle voice made big and brittle by the PA speakers. “But they opened it. The cemetery people didn’t want them to, but they did anyway. I swore I’d kill myself if they didn’t open it and get Nadine out of there.”

  “Can you remember a time she didn’t go first?” Willa asks, and Frank looks at her, but he doesn’t answer.

  “All they found inside was a coffin. The cops even pulled up part of the marble floor, but there w
asn’t anything under it. Just dirt.”

  A few more minutes, a few more details, and Janice is done. Mr. Zaroba hugs her, and she goes back to her seat. “Who wants to be next?” he asks them, and it’s the man who calls himself Charlie Jones, though they all know that’s not his real name. Every month he apologizes because he can’t use his real name at the meetings, too afraid someone at work might find out, and then he tells them about the time he opened a bedroom door in his house in Hartford, and there was nothing on the other side but stars. When he’s done, Zaroba shakes his hand, pats him on the back, and now it’s time for the woman who got lost once on the subway. Two hours just to get from South Ferry to the Houston Street station, alone in an empty train that rushed along through a darkness filled with the sound of children crying. Then a timid Colombian woman named Juanita Lazarte, the night she watched two moons cross the sky above Peekskill, the morning she watched the sun rise in the south.

  And all the others, each in his or her turn, as the big wall clock behind the lectern ticks and the night fills up with the weight and absurdity of their stories, glimpses of impossible geographies, entire worlds hidden in plain view if you’re unlucky enough to see them. “If you’re damned,” Juanita Lazarte once said and quickly crossed herself. Mr. Zaroba is there whenever anyone locks up, his blue eyes and gentle ministrations, Zaroba who was once an atmospheric scientist and pilot for the Navy. He’s seen something, too, of course, in the summer of 1969, flying supplies in a Hercules C-130 from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station. A freak storm, whiteout conditions and instrument malfunction, and when they finally found a break in the clouds somewhere over the Transantarctic Mountains, the entire crew saw the ruins of a vast city, glittering obsidian towers and shattered crystal spires, crumbling walls carved from the mountains themselves. At least that’s what Zaroba says. He also says the Navy pressured the other men into signing papers agreeing never to talk about the flight, and when he refused, he was pronounced mentally unsound by a military psychiatrist and discharged.