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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “He knows the truth would swallow him whole,” Sidney says. The leopards don’t pounce, and he adds, “He knows he’s a coward.”

  “So who is Dr. Monalisa?”

  “A bit of something the truth already swallowed and spat back up,” and Sidney chuckles sourly to himself and produces one of his pipes from a pocket of the tweed jacket. “He thinks himself a navigator, a pilot, a cartographer…”

  Frank notices that one of the two leopards has captured a stuffed peacock, holds it fast between velvet, razored paws, and he can’t remember if it was that way only a moment before.

  “He draws maps,” Sidney says. “He catalogs doors and windows and culverts.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Frank whispers, his voice low now so the old woman staring in at the giant panda exhibit won’t hear him. “You’re trying to tell me he can find places?”

  “He isn’t a sane man, Frank,” Sidney says, and now he holds up his left hand and presses his palm firmly against the glass, as if he’s testing the invisible barrier, gauging its integrity. “He has answers, but he has prices, too. You think this is Hell, you wait and see how it feels to be in debt to Dr. Solomon Monalisa.”

  “It isn’t me. It’s Willa. I think she’s starting to lose it.”

  “We all lost it a long time ago, Frank.”

  “I’m afraid she’s going to do something. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.”

  And Sidney turns his back on the leopards, then, takes the pipe from his mouth, and glares up at Frank. But some of the anger, some of the bitterness, has gone from his eyes.

  “He might keep her alive,” he says, “but you wouldn’t want her back when he was done. If she’d even come back. No, Frank. You two stay away from Monalisa. Look for your own answers. You don’t think you found that card by accident, do you? You don’t really think there are such things as coincidences? That’s not even his real address – ”

  “She can’t sleep anymore,” Frank says, but now Sidney McAvoy isn’t listening. He glances back over his shoulder at the Indian rain forest, incandescent daylight, illusory distances. “I have to go now,” he says abruptly. “I’m very busy today.”

  “I think she’s fucking dying, man,” Franks says as Sidney straightens his tie and puts the pipe back into his pocket; the old woman looks up from the panda in its unreal bamboo thicket and frowns at them both.

  “I’m very busy today, Frank. Call me next week. I think I can meet you at the Guggenheim next week.”

  And he walks quickly away towards the Roosevelt Rotunda, past the Siberian tiger and the Sumatran rhinoceros, leaving Frank alone with the frowning woman. When Sidney has vanished into the shadows behind a small herd of Indian elephants, Frank turns back to the leopards and the smudgy handprint Sidney McAvoy has left on their glass. There are the prints of six fingers.

  Hours and hours later, past sunset to the other side of the wasted day, the night that seems even hotter than the scorching afternoon, and Frank is dreaming that the crack in the basement wall on St. Mark’s Place is much too narrow for him to squeeze through. Maybe that’s the way it really happened after all, and then he hears a small, anguished sound from somewhere close behind him, something hurting or lost, but when he turns to see, Frank opens his eyes, and there’s only the tangerine glow of the noodle shop sign outside the apartment window. He blinks once, twice, but this stubborn world doesn’t go away, doesn’t break apart into random kaleidoscopic shards to become some other place entirely. So he sits up, head full of familiar disappointment, this incontestable solidity, and it takes him a moment to realize that Willa isn’t in bed. Faint outline of her body left in the wrinkled sheets, and the bathroom light is burning, the door open, so she’s probably just taking a piss.

  “You okay in there?” he calls out, but no reply. The soft drip, drip, drip of the kitchenette faucet, tick of the wind-up alarm clock on the table next to Willa’s side of the bed, street noise, but no answer. “Did you fall in or something?” he asks. “Did you drown?”

  And still no response, but his senses are waking up, picking out more than the ordinary, every-night sounds, a trilling whine pitched so high he feels it more than hears it, and now he notices the way that the air in the apartment smells.

  Go back to sleep, he thinks. When you wake up again, it’ll be over. But both legs are already over the edge of the bed, both feet already on the dusty floor.

  The trill is worming its way beneath his skin, soaking in, pricking gently at the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. All the silver fillings in his teeth have begun to hum along sympathetically. Where he’s standing, Frank can see into the bathroom, just barely, a narrow slice of linoleum, slice of porcelain toilet tank, a mildew and polyurethane fold of shower curtain. And he thinks that the air has started to shimmer, an almost imperceptible warping of the light escaping from the open door, but that might only be his imagination. He takes one small step towards the foot of the bed, and there’s Willa, standing naked before the tiny mirror above the bathroom sink. The sharp jut of her shoulder blades and hip bones, the anorexic swell of her ribcage, all the minute details of her painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh and curving light.

  “Hey. Is something wrong? Are you sick” She turns her head slowly to look at him, or maybe only looking towards him because there’s nothing much like recognition on her face. Her wide, unblinking eyes, blind woman’s stare.

  “Can’t you hear me, Willa?” he asks as she turns slowly back to the mirror. Her lips move, shaping rough, inaudible words.

  The trilling noise grows infinitesimally louder, climbs another half-octave. There’s a warm, wet trickle across Frank’s lips, and he realizes that his nose is bleeding.

  Behind Willa the bathroom wall, the shower, the low ceiling – everything – ripples and dissolves, and there’s a sudden, staccato pop as the bulb above the sink shatters. After an instant of perfect darkness, perfect nothing, there are dull and yellow-green shafts of light from somewhere far, far above, flickering light from an alien sun shining down through the waters of an alien sea. Dim, translucent shapes dart and flash through those depths, bodies more insubstantial than jellyfish, more sinuous than eels, and Willa rises to meet them, arms outstretched, her hair drifting about her face like a halo of seaweed and algae. In the ocean-filtered light, Willa’s pale skin seems sleek and smooth as dolphin flesh. Air rushes from her lips, her nostrils, and flows eagerly away in a glassy swirl of bubbles.

  The trilling has filled Frank’s head so full, and his aching skull, his brain, seem only an instant from merciful implosion, the fragile, eggshell bone collapsed by the terrible, lonely sound and the weight of all that water stacked above him. He staggers, takes a step backwards, and now Willa’s face is turned up to meet the sunlight streaming down, and she’s more beautiful than anyone or anything he’s ever seen or dreamt.

  Down on Mott Street, the screech of tires, the angry blat of a car horn, and someone begins shouting very loudly in Mandarin.

  And now the bathroom is only a bathroom again, and Willa lies in a limp, strangling heap on the floor, her wet hair and skin glistening in the light from the unbroken bulb above the sink. The water rolls off her back, her thighs, spreading across the floor in a widening puddle, and Frank realizes that the trilling has finally stopped, only the memory of it left in his ringing ears and bleeding nose. When the dizziness has passed, he goes to her, sits down on the wet floor and holds her while she coughs and pukes up gouts of saltwater and snotty strands of something the color of verdigris. Her skin is so cold it hurts to touch, cold coming off her like an inverted fever, and something small and chitinous slips from her hair and scuttles away behind the toilet on long and jointed legs.

  “Did you see?” she asks him, desperate, rheumy words gurgling out with all the water that she’s swallowed. “Did you, Frank? Did you see it?”

  “Yes,” he tells her, just like every time before. “Yes, baby. I did. I saw it all.” Willa smiles, closes her ey
es, and in a little while she’s asleep. He carries her, dripping, back to their bed and holds her until the sun rises, and she’s warm again.

  The next day neither of them goes to work, and some small, niggling part of Frank manages to worry about what will happen to them if he loses the shit job at Gotham Kwick Kopy, if Willa gets fired from the cafe, that obstinate shred of himself still capable of caring about such things. How the rent will be paid, how they’ll eat, everything that hasn’t really seemed to matter in more years than he wants to count. He spends half the morning in bed. His nosebleed keeps coming back, a roll of toilet paper and then one of their towels stained all the shades of dried and drying blood; Willa wearing her winter coat despite the heat, and she keeps trying to get him to go to a doctor, but no, he says. That might lead to questions, and besides, it’ll stop sooner or later. It’s always stopped before.

  By twelve o’clock, Willa’s traded the coat for her pink cardigan and feels good enough that she makes them peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, black coffee and stale potato chips, and after he eats Frank begins to feel better, too. But going to the park is Willa’s idea, because the apartment still smells faintly of silt and dead fish, muddy, low-tide stink that’ll take hours more to disappear completely. He knows the odor makes her nervous, so he agrees, even though he’d rather spend the afternoon sleeping off his headache. Maybe have a cold shower, another cup of Willa’s bitterstrong coffee, and if he’s lucky he could doze for hours without dreaming.

  They take the subway up to Fifth, follow the eastern edge of the park north, past the zoo and East Green all the way to Pilgrim Hill and the Conservatory Pond. It’s not so very hot that there aren’t a few model sailing ships on the pond, just enough breeze to keep their miniature Bermuda sails standing tall and taut as shark fins. Frank and Willa sit in the shade near the Alice in Wonderland statue, her favorite spot in all of Central Park, the rocky place near the tea party, granite and rustling leaves, the clean laughter of children climbing about on the huge bronze mushrooms. A little girl with frizzy black hair and red and white peppermint-striped tights is petting the kitten in Alice’s lap, stroking its metal fur and meow-

  ling loudly.

  “I can’t ever remember her name,” Willa says.

  “What?” Franks asks. “Whose name?” not sure if she means the little girl or the kitten or something else entirely.

  “Alice’s kitten. I know it had a name, but I never can remember it.”

  Frank watches the little girl for a moment. “Dinah,” he says. “I think the kitten’s name was Dinah.”

  “Oh, yeah, Dinah. That’s it,” and he knows that she’s just thinking out loud, whatever comes to mind so that she won’t have to talk about last night, so the conversation won’t accidentally find its own way back to those few drowning moments of chartreuse light and eel shadows. She’s trying so hard to pretend, and he almost decides they’re both better off if he plays along and doesn’t show her Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s white calling card.

  “That’s a good name for a cat,” she says. “If we ever get a kitten, I think I’ll name it Dinah.”

  “Mrs. Wu doesn’t like cats.”

  “Well, we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in that dump. Next time, we’ll get an apartment that allows cats.”

  Frank takes the card out and lays his wallet on the grass, but Willa hasn’t even noticed, too busy watching the children clambering about on Alice, too busy dreaming about kittens. The card is creased and smudged from a week riding around in his back pocket and all the handling it’s suffered, the edges beginning to fray, and he gives it to her without any explanation.

  “What’s this?” she asks, and he tells her to read it first, just read it, so she does. She reads it two or three times, and then Willa returns the card and goes back to watching the children. But her expression has changed, the labored, make-believe smile gone, and now she just looks like herself again, plain old Willa, the distance in her eyes, the hard angles at the corners of her mouth that aren’t quite a frown.

  “Sidney says he’s for real,” which is half the truth, at best, and Frank glances down at the card, reading it again for the hundredth or two-hundredth time.

  “Sidney McAvoy’s a fucking lunatic.”

  “He says this guy has maps – ”

  “Christ, Frank. What do you want me to say? You want me to give you permission to go talk to some crackpot? You don’t need my permission.”

  “I was hoping you’d come with me,” he replies so softly that he’s almost whispering, but he puts the card back into his wallet where neither of them will have to look at it, stuffs the wallet back into his jeans pocket.

  “Well, I won’t. I go to your goddamn meetings. I already have to listen to that asshole Zaroba. That’s enough for me, thank you very much. That’s more than enough.”

  The little girl petting Dinah slips, loses her footing and almost slides backwards off the edge of the sculpture. But her mother catches her and sets her safely on the ground.

  “I see what it’s doing to you,” Frank says. “I have to watch. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?”

  She doesn’t answer him, opens her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes. There’s only one left, and she crumbles the empty package and tosses it over her shoulder into the bushes.

  “What if this guy really can help you? What if he can make it stop?”

  Willa’s digging noisily around in her purse, trying to find her lighter or a book of matches, and she turns and stares at Frank, the cigarette hanging unlit from her lips. Her eyes shining bright as broken gemstones, fractured crystal eyes, furious, resentful, and he knows then that she could hate him, that she could leave him here and never look back. She takes the cigarette from her mouth, licks her upper lip, and for a long moment Willa holds the tip of her tongue trapped tightly between her teeth.

  “What the hell makes you think I want it to stop?”

  And only silence as what she’s said sinks in, and he begins to understand that he’s never understood her at all.

  “It’s killing you,” he says, finally, the only thing he can think to say, and Willa’s eyes seem to flash and grow brighter, more broken, more eager to slice.

  “No, Frank, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. Knowing that it’s out there, that I’ll see it again, and someday maybe it won’t make me come back here.”

  Then she gets up and walks quickly away towards the pond, taking brisk, determined steps to put more distance between them. She stops long enough to bum a light from an old black man with a dachshund, then ducks around the corner of the boathouse, and he can’t see her anymore. Frank doesn’t follow, sits watching the tiny sailboats and yachts gliding gracefully across the moss-dark surface of the water, their silent choreography of wakes and ripples. He decides maybe it’s better not to worry about Willa for now, plenty enough time for that later, and he wonders what he’ll say to Monalisa when finds him.

  We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own.

  Christiaan Huygens (c. 1690)

  * * *

  Onion

  It still frustrates me that onion looks so much like a palindrome, but isn’t. This story got far more attention than I ever thought it would. An award, “best of” reprints, and, in the Summer of 2007, a producer wanted me to make of it a screenplay. I tried, but when he told me it was only the first half of the story, I lost interest. It is as whole as I can make it, and one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions.

  Les Fleurs Empoisonnées

  ~ or ~

  Dans le Jardin des Fleurs Toxiques

  Miles past a town named Vidalia, town named after an onion, onion named after a town, but Dead Girl has no idea how many miles; the vast, unremarkable Georgia night like a seamless quilt of stars and kudzu vines,
and all these roads look the same to her. The Bailiff behind the wheel of the rusty black Monte Carlo they picked up in Jacksonville after the Oldsmobile broke down, Bobby in the front seat beside him, playing with the dials on the radio; the endless chain of honky-tonk and gospel stations is broken only by the spit and crackle of static squeezed in between. Dead Girl’s alone in the back seat, reading one of her books by moonlight. She asks Bobby to stop, please, because he’s getting on her nerves, probably getting on the Bailiff’s nerves, too. He pauses long enough to glance back at her, and his silver eyes flash like mercury and rainwater coins. He might be any six-year-old boy, except for those eyes.

  “Let him be,” the Bailiff says. “He isn’t bothering me.” Bobby smirks at her, sticks out his tongue, and goes back to playing with the radio.

  “Suit yourself,” Dead Girl says and turns a page, even though she hasn’t finished reading the last one.

  “Well, well, now,” the Bailiff says, and he laughs his husky, drywheeze laugh. “There’s a sight.”

  The Monte Carlo’s brakes squeal, metal grinding metal, and the car drifts off the road. Dead Girl sits up, and she can see the hitchhiker in the headlights, a teenage girl holding up one hand to shield her eyes from the glare.

  “I’m not hungry,” Bobby says, as if someone had asked, and Dead Girl stares at the Bailiff’s reflection in the rearview mirror. But there’s no explanation waiting for her in his green eyes, his easy smile, the secretive parchment creases of his ancient face. She wishes for the hundredth time that she’d stayed in Providence with Gable, better things to do than riding around the sticks picking up runaways and bums. Having to sleep in the trunks of rattletrap automobiles while the Bailiff runs his errands beneath the blazing Southern sun, sun so bright and violent that even the night seems scorched.