Silk

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Hey, man, we’ll talk about this after the show,” and Jonesy had laid one hand firmly on Pablo’s shoulder. “Okay? ’Cause you’re just gonna make an asshole outta yourself this way,” but those empty, dark eyes had stayed locked on Daria.

  “Give it back to me,” and everything that hadn’t been in his gaze was coiled tight and hot inside those words. He’d held both hands out for the bass, his right still encased in dirty plaster, looking more like a zombie than ever, Frankenstein’s vengeful monster come to collect his due.

  “You don’t even know these songs, man,” and Jonesy had stepped away from his mike, had moved quickly to put himself between her and Pablo.

  “It’s mine and I said give it back to me, you goddamn stinking bitch,” and Pablo had shrugged free of Jonesy’s grip, had shoved him aside and lunged for the Gibson so fast that Daria hadn’t had time to get out of his way. He’d grabbed the bass and yanked hard; the strap had held, but Daria stumbled, had lost her balance and gone down on her knees at his feet. The canvas strap had twisted up and under her chin, digging deep into her windpipe, cutting her breath off as it pulled her head around until she’d stared helplessly into Pablo’s crotch. Her hands struggled to unhook the strap, desperate fingers still stinging from the last notes of the interrupted song.

  Then Pablo had yanked again, harder than before, and Daria had heard her neck pop, had felt the nasty sensation of bone grinding cartilage. But the strap had come loose, had whipped free, and she’d crumpled, hands at her own violated throat, gasping the smoky air in reckless mouthfuls.

  And Pablo had stood above her like some ax-wielding crazy in a slasher flick, the bass clutched by the graceful handle of its neck, the dull silver instrument washed metallic red in the strobes. He’d raised it slowly over his head, over hers, and then Jonesy had hit him hard from behind, sharp rabbit punch to the base of his skull, and he should have gone down and stayed down. Instead, he only stumbled and drove one hard shoe tip into Daria’s left ear.

  “FUCK OFF!” he’d screamed, screamed high and shrill in a voice that had hardly sounded human, much less like Pablo. He’d swung the bass around fast and hard and nailed Jonesy square in the chest. Still wheezing, struggling to get enough air, Daria had clearly heard the wet snap of breaking bone, and Jonesy McCabe had sailed backwards, colliding in a noisy tangle with Carlton ’s drums. And then Carlton had tackled Pablo, and they’d both disappeared over the side of the stage, swallowed immediately by the mad crush of bodies.

  Daria had staggered to her knees again, and people had begun to back away from the stage, clearing out a small, irregular circle of the warehouse’s concrete floor where Carlton was busy slamming his fists repeatedly into Pablo’s face. The Gibson had lain a few feet away from them, trampled, broken, irrelevant.

  She stood up, hands out cautious like a tightrope walker, purple-white blotches dancing in her eyes. Jonesy in a limp heap, unconscious amid the jumble of brass cymbals and aluminum tripod stalks. Abruptly, the lights had stopped strobing, and she’d seen the dark trickle of blood at each corner of his mouth. For all she’d known, Pablo had killed him, and Carlton was in the process of killing Pablo. Because of her, because she’d tried to steal something that wasn’t hers to take. Because for once in her grubby life something had felt right. Daria used the rig the bass had been plugged into to brace herself, had taken one step toward Jonesy.

  And then the pain had gone off like a grenade lodged somewhere deep inside her skull, perfect agony filling in the place where her brain should have been, drowning body and mind in its searing electric gush. And the last thing she’d seen on the way down to merciful blackout was Carlton, climbing back onto the stage, nose squashed and bloodied grimace, and the shattered Gibson clasped triumphantly in one hand.

  4.

  Niki set the receiver back into its black cradle and sighed, a loud exasperated sound, and Daria could see that she was really having to work at the half smile, only a weak droop at the corners of her perfect lips.

  “That bad?” she asked, and Niki shrugged, stared down at her feet. Her toenails were painted a dark and pearly blue.

  “Yeah,” Niki said. “Or worse.”

  “Can they fix it?” Daria was sitting at the edge of the bed now, her own feet dangling over the side, not bare, but hidden inside tube socks with mismatched colored bands around the tops. Left, orange. Right, maroon.

  “Yeah, if I want to hand over every penny I have.”

  “You should get a second opinion,” Claude said from the kitchen sink; washing the breakfast dishes, three cups and three saucers and Ivory liquid suds up to his elbows. “Most of those guys are crooked as the letter M.”

  “Yeah,” Niki said, and then, “I don’t know.”

  “Dar knows mechanics, don’t you, Dar? The big guy that plays guitar for Vanilla Domination, and that other guy, the one who looks like Nick Cave, except not so ugly.”

  Daria was still looking down at her own feet, homely twins and a big hole in one heel so she could see the scar where she stepped on a broken 7Up bottle last summer.

  “Yeah, I’m sure I can find someone to take at look at it, if you want.”

  Niki stood and stretched, and Robert Smith, white face, blackened eyes, fright-wig do, stared back at Daria from Niki’s belly.

  “Thanks, guys, but I’m afraid I’d only be delaying the inevitable. It’s either my bank account or the junkyard. I just have to decide which.”

  “It certainly couldn’t hurt,” Claude said, setting a coffee cup down to dry. “Just to be sure.”

  Niki shrugged again and then sniffed cautiously at one underarm, wrinkled her nose, and to Daria, even that seemed somehow graceful.

  “God, I stink. Would it be okay if I used the shower?”

  “Go right ahead,” Daria said and reached for another Marlboro, looking away before Niki Ky did anything else to make her feel awkward, dumpy, like a gorilla at charm school.

  “You guys are wonderful,” Niki said. “I just hope you don’t get sick of me before I can get my ass back on the road,” and she picked up the pink gym bag and stepped into the tiny bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her; Daria could hear her wrestling with the useless old lock.

  “It hasn’t worked since I’ve been here,” Daria shouted and immediately Niki stopped fumbling with the doorknob. A moment later, the loud, rusty squeak of brass hot and cold water handles and the sudden, wet shissh of the showerhead.

  “Well,” Claude said, fastidiously drying his hands with a checkered dishtowel. “I still say she’s better than Keith.”

  Daria exhaled smoke through her nostrils, stared through the window at the fiery place in the sky where the sun had gone down.

  “Just shut up, Claude.”

  She sat there until the sky was almost black, the deep indigo before true night, her cigarette smoked down to the filter and Niki still in the shower; trying not to think about Keith Barry or her father or the delicate itch of spider legs on naked skin. Unable to think of anything else.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Robin

  1.

  T he girl with absinthe hair, algae hair, slipped into her fishnets and fastened her garters to the elastic band around the top of the hose. Her doppelgänger in the big gilt-framed mirror followed her every move, looking-glass girl who mocked her style and the nurtured pallor of her white skin. Sometimes Robin tried to outsmart her, misdirection, sleight of hand or foot or the slimmest parting of her lips. Nothing personal, but if the poor girl can’t be more original, she has to expect a little flack, and Robin slid into the velvet skirt, mini-short, and her twin did the same, never missed a beat.

  There was no hurry. She didn’t have to meet Spyder and Byron at Dr. Jekyll’s for two hours yet, and she was still horny, even after an hour in bed, masturbating and watching the pictures on her ceiling, the ones she painted there last summer, making this place safe: two ladders and plywood stretched between them, just like Michelangelo.

  The hurricane sw
irl of clouds, black-and-blue as the swollen belly of a thunderhead near the walls and the poppy-red of Nagasaki at the eye, every shade of conflagration in between. Heaven spilling its fire and guts, and the broken angels plunging, wings back and trailing starlight and feathers. And something terrible that she’d only suggested, watching from the still heart of the storm. The angels had skin like statues, eyes like sapphire and dusk, and between their legs, the perfect alloy of man and woman. Not sexless, but genitals that had not yet been forced to take a side.

  Ritual in pretended fresco, something against the shadows.

  The girl inside the mirror ran one pinkie through the silver ring in Robin’s navel-fresh piercing and the wound still red at the edges-tugging gently, playfully. Robin removed the blouse from its wire hanger, black lace and no sleeves, crimson buttons like drops of stage blood. The gloves were black, too, and lace, and they hid the nubs of her fingernails, the cuticles chewed raw and ragged.

  Two knocks at her bedroom door, soft and hesitant, and her mother speaking through the wood.

  “Robin? Are you going out tonight, dear?”

  “Yes, Mother,” and the girl in the mirror stuck out her tongue, bright and wet against lips the color of ash. Robin’s teeth caught it, held it, supplicant flesh squeezed helpless between her incisors.

  “Your father’s working late, and I’m having dinner with Marjorie and Quentin. Don’t forget to lock up, and set the alarm when you leave.”

  Robin’s teeth parted, and her tongue slipped gratefully back inside her mouth.

  “Promise?”

  “Yes,” Robin said.

  “Good girl,” her mother said. “Have fun and drive safe,” like some fucking public service blurb, and Robin turned her back on the mirror. Concentrated on buttoning each sanguine button, on the retreating tattoo of her mother’s footsteps. Her mother played pretend, pretend that Robin was still a child, pretend that her father was held up late over his blueprints and drafting tools instead of his latest whore girlfriend. That her life wasn’t as hellish as everything else in the world, and Robin didn’t really give a shit as long they paid the bills on her charge cards and didn’t bitch about where she spent her nights. Who she spent them with.

  Robin sat down on one rumpled corner of the bed and laced her feet tight into tall vinyl boots, icicle heels and toes like fresh slices of midnight. The calm she’d felt only a minute before had dissolved completely, whatever dim sanctuary her room conferred violated by her mother’s voice and brittle delusions, and now all she wanted was to escape. Put all the miles she could between herself and the neat suburban rows of brick and aluminum siding, pretty mortgaged cancers, and follow the interstate over the mountains, to Spyder and the honest desolation of the city.

  But she’d wait a few more minutes, give her mother plenty of time to clear out. Robin lay back on the bed, the sheets that smelled like jasmine incense and clove cigarettes and her musty sex, and stared at the walls.

  Walls her painstaking alchemy of acrylics and sponge dabbings had transformed into some impossible marble, simple Sheetrock into ebony stone shot through with scarlet quartz veins. Four stark slabs supporting, framing, the tragic tableau overhead, the pillars of the world, and the walls were almost bare: only a giant Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above the headboard and a raccoon skull hanging snout down in the narrow space between her cluttered bookshelf and the new stereo her parents had given her for her last birthday.

  “Nineteen,” her mother had said. “Robin’s so mature for just nineteen. Don’t you think so, Bill?” And her father had smiled, his eyes a hundred miles away.

  She’d painted the door a single bottomless shade of glistening black, like hot tar or spilled oil, clinging absence of anything like light.

  Robin listened, as patient as anything cornered, and when she finally heard the faint growl and clank of the automatic garage door, the softer purr of her mother’s car backing out of the drive, she got up and opened the black door.

  2.

  This is where it started.

  On an April night when thunderstorms had swept out of Mississippi, raking the world with lightning and the promise of tornadoes, and the city’s civil defense sirens had howled shrill apocalypse. And Walter, who said he wanted to be a sailor and only pretended to be queer so nobody would think he was strange, had brought them a tiny bit of opium, black tar in Spyder’s antique hookah, just like Gomez and Morticia. There was almost nothing that Walter could not secure, given time and the cash, no pill or herb or intoxicating powder too exotic that he didn’t seem to have a source, somewhere.

  Gawky Walter Ayers, rawboned and hair like a handful of dead mice, so hard in love with Robin that she always got to laughing if she looked at his eyes too long. He bought her company, Spyder’s, Byron’s, with drugs and clumsy, helpless charm.

  And that night the storm and Bauhaus turned down low so they could still hear the thunder and the sizzling rain and sirens, and she’d nestled content and almost naked in Spyder’s tattooed arms; waiting for her turn at the water pipe’s brass mouthpiece. Listening to whatever Walter was saying, gathering his words inside her head: the book he was reading on the Holy Grail, having exhausted Jessie Weston and Roger Sherman Loomis, a book by Carl Jung’s wife and the grail as vessel, the sword and the lance, grail as stone. She’d watched their candle-oranged faces: Walter’s too excited; Byron, bored, but watching Spyder to see what she thought before he agreed or disagreed.

  “And these angels, the zwivelaere, had wanted to preserve the original God-image,” he said, “the unity, the divine inner opposites that were being torn apart by the war in Heaven.”

  “Zwivelaere,” the German had rolled easy and slow from Spyder’s tongue. “What does that mean?” And then she’d taken the mouthpiece from him and filled her cheeks with the faintly sweet, acrid smoke, had leaned down, and Robin parted her lips and accepted the kiss, taking Spyder’s breath and the opium inside her, had closed her eyes and only exhaled when her lungs had finally begun to ache and the distant thrum in her ears, like the empty space between radio stations.

  “The doubters,” Walter answered, guarded awe in his voice like this was a secret, dangerous knowledge, and Spyder only nodded her head.

  Robin had watched Spyder’s slow eyes, eyes the gentle color of faded denim. Spyder almost never smoked anything but pot, routinely turned down the best acid and ’shrooms, but the opium was a treat too rare to allow her caution to interfere, her fear of the wild things and places in her head. Robin knew it was those parts of Spyder she loved most, the turbulence behind those pacific eyes, the part that Spyder locked away with her tranquilizers and antidepressants.

  “The doubters hid the grail stone on the earth,” Walter said, and she wished he would shut up. He rarely actually seemed to understand the books he read, arcane treatises on conspiracy and occult Christian orders; but he rattled on about then endlessly in a desperate attempt to impress her, and so it had become a sort of game: she fed his desperation by suggesting the most difficult texts and watched as he struggled, fixated on the obvious, the superficial skin of myth and history. Everything reduced to Tolkien-simple fantasy, and the magic and deeper mystery lost on him.

  She did not particularly dislike Walter, but she didn’t love him the way Spyder did, either. Didn’t see him as some integral part of the circle of her life.

  The storm had rattled at the windows, wanting in, and she’d watched the water caught like glistening bugs in the screen wire behind the glass.

  There was a longish pause in Walter’s exposition, then, and Byron sighed loudly, got up from his seat on the spring-shot sofa to put a new CD on or a tape, cold molasses motion. And Walter had said, “I can get some buttons next week, if anyone’s interested.”

  “Buttons?” Byron said. “What kind of ‘buttons’?”

  “Peyote,” and the word had brought Robin drifting back from her contemplation of the raindrops trapped inside the squares of wire, held fast by fate and their own
surface tension.

  “How much?” she’d asked him, and Walter looked lost for a second and shrugged.

  “Randy said to get back to him about the price, but-”

  “No, I mean how many buttons can you get?”

  “Oh,” and she’d seen his hot embarrassment, inordinate unease over nothing at all.

  “Probably as much as we want,” he’d said. “Why?”

  “’Cause I did peyote once when I lived down in Mobile, but I only got one button and it didn’t do anything much but make me puke. You gotta eat a lot, like nine or ten buttons at least, if you’re gonna get a good trip off it.”

  Byron had stopped fumbling through Spyder’s CDs, clack-clack-clack of jewel cases against one another, and put on My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Sexplosion, skipped ahead to “Sex on Wheelz.” The music drowned the storm, and Robin had to raise her voice to be heard.

  “It would be worth it,” she’d said, “if you could get enough.”

  “I heard that stuff tastes like shit.” Byron had returned to the sofa and took his turn at the hookah.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” and Walter had tried to sound matter-of-fact about it, sure of himself, but she’d heard the crisp uncertainty between his words, knew that the chances of his coming up with that much peyote were slim to none. Just another test, like Carlos Castenada and Foucault’s Pendulum. Spyder had frowned down at her with sleepy blue eyes full of admonition and lazy passion.

  A little while later, the last of the opium gone and she’d followed Spyder to the bedroom, leaving Walter and Byron alone in each other’s company. Down the narrow hallway, past closed doors, into the dusty heart of the big house and the dark where she could hear the storm again.

  Not the next week, or the week after, but early in May, Walter had shown up at Weird Trappings very late one afternoon, her and Spyder closing up the shop, planning to spend the whole night watching Dario Argento videos and screwing on the living room floor, and he’d stood on the far side of the counter while Spyder counted out the register. Had shifted, impatient dance, one foot to the other, occasionally looking back over his shoulder as if someone might be following him. Walter had set the book he was reading down on the smudgy glass countertop, a library copy of Charles Fort’s Lo!, Robin’s latest suggestion and his place marked about halfway through with a dirty pigeon feather. The book and a big Piggly Wiggly bag, grocery-brown paper rolled closed at the top.